Cancer Sucks - Part 6

I can’t believe it’s already July. This year has been a whirlwind so far.

We finally got a new set of scans to see how the treatment has been working. Our last set was early April, about a week before his first treatment. Those were the ones that dictated that he really shouldn’t wait for the trail and needed treatment right away. We followed the standard of care, minus Avastin, since we’re worried about perforation of the bladder. Unfortunately it didn’t seem to be affective and Seth’s main tumor has grown and is getting worse and he now has 2 additional masses in his lung and the surrounding lymphnoids. To say I’m devastated that the last two months of treatment were apparently pointless is an understatement, but we are swiftly shifting gears away from FolFox to FolFiri as a new treatment and starting Wednesday we begin the whole process again. We’ll have a whole new set of side effects to deal with and his reactions will be unpredictable for now, but all of that aside we can only hope that this new treatment finally works and that we see improvements.

He’s down to 130 lbs, and we’d managed to get some weight on him, but it all came back off since the last treatment. His hemoglobin count is really low and they want to give him a Procrit shot, but the warning on the consent form literally says ‘I understand that this may make my tumor grow and that I might die faster’ so I won’t be allowing that shot for the time being. We can’t afford any more setbacks at the moment.

The tumor was far too big to operate on before, and now it’s bigger still, so something has to work to shrink it down. It was not good news, but we’re keeping our hopes high that the next treatment will be very effective.