Great News

I got my PET scan results back and the tumors are gone! There's no presence of the cancer they can see on the PET scan. WHEW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! What a relief, it would have been very difficult to go through two rounds of that chemotherapy and have it not work.

My other tests all came back great also. My echocardiogram, EKG, chest x-ray and blood work show that my body is holding up extremely well. There's been very little damage to my internal organs. This is great because it means they can give me the full on dose of chemo to kill my bone marrow in the transplant. That's a good thing according to my doctor.

There's something about them killing all of my bone marrow that makes me a little uneasy. I don't want to think about how much that's gonna hurt. Woof, not fun.

This changes nothing in terms of another round of chemo nor the stem cell transplant. I begin my next round of R-ICE chemotherapy tomorrow morning bright and early. Four more days, then I'm done with R-ICE chemotherapy, at least for now. Rock on, almost done.

Then, the stem cell harvest process begins on August 9th with Neupogen shots. They overdose me on the drug because it stimulates cells production in my bone marrow, and that how they get enough stem cells into my blood to harvest it with apherisis. A week of that, then 10 days to recover and I go into isolation for a month beginning 8/26.

One day at a time, that's how I keep it going. Its hard, but its what I have to do to beat this shitty disease and have any hope of spending a wonderful life with Honore and Hope. I read the other day that Randy Pascal(sp?), the Last Lecture author died. Its real, this shit kills. Cancer is deadly and you do not want to fuck with it.

I hope research finally finds a cure. We'll see. It's a beautiful day here, and I"m going to go enjoy it while I still feel good.

Love,

T