What's Shimada You?

Hello, everyone.

We met with the oncologist today. Got some not so great news. Turns out that Eva has neuroblastoma not ganglioneuroblastoma. In as best as I can explain it, there are three things that they thought it could be, ganglioneuroma, ganglioneuroblastmoa or neuroblastoma, in order from best to worst.

Initially, they had thought that it was the ganglioneuroblastoma but when the path came back, it was the neuroblastoma. Good news in this is that she has what is called a "favorable histology" which somehow relates to a good thing. Of that scale, it goes favorable, intermediate and poor.

Without going into all the details (which would take forever), the bottom line between the ganglioneuroblastoma and the neuroblastoma is that neuroblastoma has a higher chance of recurrence.

The cancer did spread to a lymph node but that did not surprise me. The dr. had told us very early on that there was one in close proximity of the tumor so not to be surprised it it was affected.

We are still waiting on one final marker for the tumor. If it has blah-bi-de-blah marker (that's a technical term), we have a very aggressive treatment of chemo and radiation. If it comes back that that marker is missing, the treatment is just the surgery and chest ct every three months for two years.

Unfortunately, we won't get that information for another five to seven days.

We are back in the room today and just waiting for Eva to drain less from her chest tube. Once she gets to a certain level, we can go home. That looks like it will be Friday. That said, she's bright and perky and almost to her normal self. She's chatting away with all the doctors and nurses. I just looked up at her and she is trying to scale the crib with her "club foot"--her foot has the IV. Maybe having the chest "leash" at home wouldn't be so bad...

I swear, getting all this information, the names seem like they come from a Mel Brooks movie. The "ploidy" is this, she's X on the "shimada scale", her "shwannian stroma"...