Friday the 13th (dum dum dum)

Hello! and Happy Valentine's Day!

Yesterday I took dad to his doctors appointment, and a four hour day turned into a 9 hour day. Lovely, right? First thing in the morning, dad had a PET scan that wasn't nearly as bad as he remembers. He had to drink four cups of dye and lay on the table for 25 minutes while they took pictures, and overall, it was pretty easy and relaxing. After the scan, we ran to the cafeteria for some food, then came back for dad's appointment with the palliative care (pain management) person, Dr. Macpherson. She's very nice and we appreciate that she takes the time to listen to everything we have to say. In any case, we met with her and described where dad's at; she had two primary concerns:

1) dad has had some bleeding after his violent throwing up episodes. She said that's not natural, so she ran some blood tests and it turns out that dad is even more anemic than he was before his last blood transfusion, and his platelets were also down (accounting for the extra bleeding). As a reminder, his blood levels are down because of the chemo - it's one of the side effects. Therefore, after our appointment we went to the AF hospital so dad could get typed and matched for a blood transfusion on Monday. Another five hour hospital day. Yippee. At least the transfusion should help dad feel better, though.

2) The second concern was that dad has right kidney pain. Earlier in the week, dad had some cultures done to see if he had a kidney infection, so we called and got those results (which were negative - no infection). Dr. Macpherson rushed the PET scan results from that morning, and determined that there are fluids around dad's kidney that means either a) his ureters are too blocked to drain the kidney, so he'll have to have a permanent external drain in his lower back, or b) his ureter is draining poorly, so we'll let it struggle and just treat dad's kidney pain. We're not sure how the kidney is doing, so dad has a renal scan scheduled for Tuesday. Once we see what it looks like, we'll know better exactly what our options are.

Dad's first PET scan back in November served as a marker to see where the tumors were and how big they were. The PET scan yesterday helped us compare the tumors to where they were back in November. The results showed that in some places, the tumors had shrunken or disappeared, but that there was new tumor development along his midline chest. Dr. Whisenant was pleased with the results, referring to them as "half good, half bad." There was some new growth, but it wasn't an extremely aggressive spreading. Again, that says very little about time lines, but it helps us know that the chemo is doing some good stuff (and therefore worth the trade off).

That's about all our exciting news this week, other than the fact that it's VALENTINE'S DAY!
We hope you all hug and smooch your loved ones today! We're glad for these cheesy but sweet reminders of how we are blessed to have loved ones far and near.
We love you all!
The Losers