Friday, October 17, 2008

Progress

In the world of someone with brain cancer progress is not a good thing, in fact it is bad news overall. At mom's last checkup we were told that one of the tumors got a little bit larger and is now 1 1/2" in size which is not what we wanted to hear. The first course of action was that we could hit it with one high dose of radiation and that is what we were told would happen and in fact we had the appointment for that to happen this past week. One phone call from the oncologist changed all of that. "The tumor board met and discussed your mom's case and the neurosurgeon feels he can remove the tumor." I was a bit stunned at first because back in January when mom had the craniotomy I was told that they didn't get it all at the time so I just assumed that it wasn't operable. I think on some levels it is the expertise of the doctor that you have and perhaps had mom been living up here in New York back at the time she was diagnosed we might have gotten a complete resection at that time.

We met with Dr. Rosiello yesterday and mom and I liked him very much and I feel that he has the skills necessary to complete this resection with minimal neurological effects. He said that once he gets in there he will assess what he feels he can safely remove but he did state that the tumor is very close to the surface and he sees no reason why he can't remove it. He also went on to say that one of the other smaller tumors is very close to the larger one and he wants to go ahead and remove that one also even though is is small and hasn't grown in size since diagnosis.

While mom and I were having lunch at her favorite place today ( Quiznos ) we got the phone call from the doctor's secretary that the surgery is scheduled for 10/30 so things are moving along. I would ask everyone that reads my blog to please keep mom in your prayers on that day and also pray for the doctor that his hands be guided to remove the cancer from her body.

Aside from all of the medical stuff going on here life continues to move at a fast pace here. Robert will be home in just over 2 months and we are all really excited and so ready to have him back after his service is completed.

Alex and Jim have been working on the new treehouse almost every day when Jim gets home from work and it is slow going but it's going. We have been pretty lucky that Jim has been getting home early these past few days even though he's working in Jersey City right now.

We will have a pretty nice tree house when all the work is done but more than that I think the time that Jim and Alex are spending together is more important than anything. Alex wanted me to take this video of him on his trampoline but little did I know that he was going to jump out of the tree onto the trampoline!! I don't know how he comes up with this stuff but he wanted me to take a video and send it to his brother, Bobby...I hope you appreciate this because I almost had a heart attack at first when I saw him jump out of the tree! But Alex wanted you to see him jump and he couldn't hear any of my warnings. Dad just said he's crazy and he gave up doing anything about it!

Tomorrow is Alex's Bike A Thon and he is raising money for his school and he is very proud of his effort in doing that. After lunch we plan to head on over to the Harbes Family Farm in Jamesport and get us a really good pumpkin for some Halloween carving and maybe even attempt the 8 acre corn maze.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I will be praying every day
love Madeleine