Medical Update

Well I am going to try to keep this entry focussed on the medical stuff. The news is not good. The PET scan shows active disease in the enlarged node (which is now half as big as the orignal tumour) and small traces in multiple other glands up towards the top of my chest and neck. This seems to rule out any quick radiotherapy route for me. There is also a positive result below my chest near my liver but there is a fair chance that this may be a false positive picking up the small intestine - the UK PET experts in London are going to give a second opinion on that over the next few days. So its confirmed that the disease beat the AVBD chemo, got outside the radiotherapy zone before it was applied, and is growing agressivily now (although was killed in the original tumours). Simply extending the radiotherapy more broadly could just see the same thing happen again and starts to reach loadings which bring significant possibility of secondary cancers.

So it looks like the heavy chemo and stem cell route for me, I will meet with the chemo team next thursday to get a more intense briefing on the program but the outline so far is something like 2 cycles of chemo each of three weeks each requiring a week in hospital, somewhere in there they do the harvesting of the stem cells, followed by the actual stem cell replacement chemo which will put me in hospital in isolation for three further weeks and then some significant recovery period to follow. Roughly that feels like it will take me out completely for about four months from a work perspective from the start of the treatment but I will get the full details from the stem cell guys next thursday. It seems like as next thursday is already the 14th that the treatment may start just after christmas to allow for a nice christmas with the kids before we jump into the hospital cycles.

I am setting off now to do my background research on the treatment, the side effects, how to manage the side effects and how to set myself up mentally and phisically for the task. The good news is that this treatment is improving all the time and the doctors are pretty confident that they can get the disease with the treatment and that it is not likly to come back once they nail it properly this time. Lets hope they are right !

Once I have researched things a bit more I will get back to you with an enhanced overview.

Regards

Gerry