April 2, 2011 Part I

When we went to visit David today a little after lunch we found out that David had still not started receiving his chemo yet. The chemo has to be mixed according to his weight and they needed to reconfirm what he weighed before the pharmacist could mix the chemicals. David still hadn’t received the chemo by 4:00 pm today and he personally picked up his cell phone and called Dr. Sender (his oncologist). Dr. Sender said “I’ll be there in 20 minutes” and was in David’s room in 15 minutes. Within a very short time David was receiving his “pre-chemo” meds; Zofran (anti-nausea) and Prednisone. He was supposed to get the chemo tonight.

Dr. Sender shared that 25% of his patients relapse after having been in remission. He also spent time explaining a little more of the treatment plan. Some of the information contradicts what I wrote yesterday which we had heard from a hospital staff. Not all the news was very encouraging.

There is a 50% chance that the chemo could kill David and a 40% chance of David going back into remission.

The two scenarios that he shared were:

• If David doesn’t go into remission in the next 30 days, he will need to have a bone marrow transplant immediately.
• If David does go in into remission he will then go through 2 more additional months of chemo treatments before having the bone marrow transplant. The chances of survival are much higher with this scenario.

One piece of good news today, the spinal tap results came back “all clean”, meaning they found no cancer in the brain.

Many people have asked how they can help. Here are some immediate needs that would be helpful.
Donation requests:

• Gas cards – It now takes Chrissy 1 ½ hours to drive one way from their home to the hospital. The current budget will limit her to one visit a week. 
• Bluetooth for her cell phone – with many more hours on the road, a Bluetooth would make driving much safer. 
• Chrissy needs the tires rotated on her car