Monday, February 22, 2016

What A Week...

I have to apologize once again for being so late in cross-posting my articles here. Last week was pretty much a maelstrom after Wednesday, and not in a good way.

As some (many?) of you reading this will know, my wife is battling cancer and that battle has not been going particularly well. We got a very negative update on this past Wednesday - the scans show that the cancer has spread extensively into her bones and lungs and she has a tumor in her liver large enough to impact her breathing (by pushing on the diaphragm). There may also be brain mets, but it's hard to tell (there will be a follow-up scan).

At this point, all that's left is to try to get her into a clinical trial. There's a promising adaptive T-cell therapy study at the NIH and that's what we're shooting for. If she's selected (and that's still a big if) she'll have to go through surgery and then survive a three-month wait to truly begin the therapy (it takes that long to culture the cells). We would assume that they would not enroll her in the study if she was unlikely to live to that three-month point, so we could be in for a pretty sobering dose of reality if we hear soon that they won't take her into the study.

We're not past the point of hope, but we're realistic about where things stand. We're now in that phase where you have to think "Well ... I'm out of bullets. Time to throw the gun".

Once again, my apologies for not being reliable/consistent with getting my articles linked on here. Unfortunately, this is probably going to continue (consistently inconsistent).

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