Met with the doctor this morning. Have a clearer picture of what we've got. Here's the deal. Eva still has a very very small tumor in her, right on her spine on the lower left side. It is slightly smaller than it was when we saw it after round 2.
What does that mean? Lots.
The first thing we have to do is determine if this is immature NB cells. The doctors do not suspect that they are. They suspect that it was a mix of immature (bad) and mature (not bad on the scale) cells. They think that the chemo that we had killed those immature cells and left the mature cells, thus the slightly smaller size.
So, we did the urine test to see if her catacholemines are elevated. They also did lots of blood work to verify this.
If it comes back abnormal, stop. Go to path A, we do more chemo.
If it comes back normal, we go to path B. Path B is we meet with the surgeon to discuss whether or not we remove the tumor. Why would we not? Well, it's in a pretty tricky location, just hugging the spine.
Path B1-Surgery (most likely scenario)--this way we can remove the tumor, look at it and make sure that it was all mature as they suspect.
Path B2-Watchful waiting (the do nothing plan, as we call it)--this will have us getting just an MRI every eight weeks for the next year.
So, we get the results of all the blood work on Monday the 29th.
There is still much to celebrate. They think it is highly unlikely that we will need more chemo so we'll celebrate that. If it changes and we do, we'll deal with that when we come to it.
This is a great Christmas gift, that is for sure.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Much to celebrate!
Post a Comment