Things are starting to look up!

I didn’t expect to have much news from today’s visit with Dr. Bonomi since we didn’t do any scans.  But we did take blood.  And there was good news there – the tumor markers that had steadily been going up for the past many visits came way down!  The CA-125 marker came down from 67 to 12.  The CEA marker came down from 20.9 to 5.2. 

Overall, I’m feeling better too.  Not as achy, more alert, and stomach feeling much better.  I haven’t vomited in over a month.  It’s looking like this new drug is working for me.  We’ll have the scans that will be definitive about the progress on November 23.  The drug is still awaiting FDA approval.  Dr. Bonomi is now hearing late December.  I hardly pay attention anymore since they’ve been saying FDA will approve by the end of the month since April or so.  I’m on the drug, and although I’d prefer not to go to Michigan every 6 weeks to get it (especially in the winter), I’m happy to be on it.

Let's hope the scans reveal more good news in November.

HospitalMANIA!!

Hi everyone,

Yes, it’s true. Another hospital visit report.  I just can’t get enough of hospitals!  This was my regular three-week cycle visit to Rush but without the chemo (YAY!)  It did include a CAT scan of the lungs.  Same old. Same old.  A few more lesions and a few are a little bigger but nothing they are concerned about.  A new 8 mm spot found in the liver.  Dr. Bonomi is not at all concerned about that either.  He is very happy I got on the new drug and has a really good feeling we will start seeing improvement soon.

Between the cycles of the two hospitals, I will be spending even more time at hospitals since both oncologists want to keep tabs on me. Rush is doing all the labs and scans for Sparrow and sending copies to them there.  I also have to have weekly labs taken and sent to Sparrow (the weeks I’m not at Rush to do them) to monitor how my system is handling the new drug.  That goes weekly for the  first month and bi-monthly the second month.  I have those done at Highland Park Hospital.

My next trip to Lansing is Friday, October 23 and then on Monday, October 26 I have lab work and a consultation with Dr. Bonomi at Rush.  They think that time would be too soon to see any results so we are postponing scans for both the lungs and the brains until November 23.  Then I’ll have a whopper of a visit to Rush for all the scans and hopefully a very happy and thankful Turkey Day.

I am not planning to send another blog update like this until after that November 23 scanapalooza unless some specific news comes up in the meantime.

Be well and be happy and have a great Halloween!