I spent a couple hours this morning with Debbie, one of the nurses at Dr. Frenette's office. The point of the meeting was to walk through the detail of the upcoming ABVD chemotherapy treatment. It was called a "learn" session and was very similar to the one Stuart and I attended last week at Dr. Hellner's office.
Dr. Frenette sounds like he is a big believer in "throwing the kitchen sink" at the side-effects that may result from the treatment. Debbie walked me through a very expansive regime of drugs to deal with nausea, fever, chills, allergies, constipation, diarrhea, indigestion, sleep problems, etc. It seems there are many side effects to ABVD Chemotherapy that can be controlled through drugs up front. Others, like blood count changes and sore throat are treated symptomatically. Others still, like hair-loss, sadly, cannot be controlled.
Everything is now set for the port placement tomorrow morning and the start of treatment on Thursday.
Over lunch, we got wonderful news from Dr. Hellner's office. The results of the bone marrow biopsy came back negative; everything is fine with my bone marrow! This finalizes the diagnosis as Stage IIIa. Stuart and I both cried, as this was the first piece of good news in a very long string of bad news.
That is great news Dan!! Thanks for passing the blog along. Sarah and I will certainly be thinking about you and your family as we follow your progress. If you need an extra Kithen Sink to throw, just let me know. I can bring over a volleyball net, some sand, and a little Tupac and we can recreate the old days behind the Chi house.
ReplyDeleteBrian
Brian - thanks for commenting...the Tupac reference brought a huge smile to my face.
ReplyDelete