Kev's Post

Deneen's been trying to keep everyone updated with my condiition and now I'll try it. My head isn't always clear and sometimes it takes a week to get where I think I should be in a day but I'll try and work thru those problems.

So if we go back to about August of 2005, the doctor's find a pea size tumor in my brain. This is really worrisome because (I think) fluids are not easily passed from the spinal cord/brain to the main body and conversely treatment introduced to the body won't make it into the brain.

Just for a caveat, I've been reading little books on how the whole body works. I want a nice clear definition like how a machine operates or an equation. Unfortunately, I'm finding lot's of vagueness with drug trials that showed 80% effectiveness. My point is when I explain how I think something works from a cancer aspect it usually means that's the best concept I could form. I would ask my doctor, I would tell him what I read and he would tell what he thought. Very few times did the doctor have a strong understanding of exactly what's going on but he did know what the procedure is to deal with it and he's done it a bunch of times.

Going back to last August, the tumor is kind of sitting on top of the brain, it's small, so the doctor wants to zap it. If they get it, it just fades away, if not we can operate. The procedure is in and out in one day. But it's also creepy. You walk in and they install this helmet/ring on your nogggin, of course this means 4 screws threaded into your skull and 4 numbing shots before that into the skull that don't hurt much but have a noise of a needle in crunching bone that gave me the hibigibi's. Once they get the helmet on they send you down for an accurate MRI locating the tumor to the helmet. Back to the laser room, someone or a new program does a little math. I get bolted down to the table by the helmet so the reference isn't loss ( good thing they drove those screws deep) and the laser takes about 5 shots from 5 locations so only the tumor really gets it good. I keep thinking about the guy with the helmet on in the dungeon from the 3 Musketeers. They take my helmet off and let me go home.

During this same time period, I am finishing up chemo for other tumor sites (lung, groin, arm pit, skin sites). It's a cocktail of 3 chemo drugs plus IL2 and Interferon, and I spent the summer taking the stuff. By Octoberish, we are done with chemo. I've taken as much as they will allow and I'm getting some neurapathy. We saw some shrinkage of some of the tumors, a lot shrinkage of some tumors and some didn't change. Nothing grew or appeared during this time.

What does this mean? Way to early in the story to go there.

In the mean time (late fall 2005), we get an MRI of the brain it looks to be healing up. We look again in Febuary and it also looks to be healing but the doctor asks if I've had any loss of control of the left arm because there's a little swelling on the brain going on right where the tumor was. He tells me not to worry about it, if I do have a little seizure they can treat that and if the swelling won't stop we can go back to plan 1 and operate. When I look at the scans, I think the tumor is gone and there's just some fluid floating around, we compare the latest scans against 2 monthes and things look better to me. So I leave feeling pretty good.

...to be continued