After a very relaxing 5 days in sunny Florida we returned to Washington DC on Wednesday. We swam, we went sailing, we saw the sunset every evening and even saw a wedding on the beach at sunset, which the girls loved! We slept and we had some nice food. Just what the doctor ordered. We are now ready to face the next few weeks and beyond.
Thursday morning we were back at the hospital to restart chemo. Isabella will continue with the previous regime of carboplatin and vincristine administered through her port and will now take a daily tablet of gleevec. The daily tablet turns out to be 3.5 pills in the morning and 3.5 pills in the evening. She's being very cooperative about it all. A better pill taker than her mother. Gleevec should further slow down the growth of the cancer cells. It is a drug that is being used for many forms of cancer, it does not tend to produce too many serious side effects.
We also went over the results of the MRI. The doctors repeated the good news and showed us the visual evidence of where the main brain tumor has shrunk. Some people experience faster shrinkage but this is not necessarily an indication that it will not regrow in the future. Slow and steady, we'll get rid of these tumors over the course of the next year through this current chemo regime. Hopefully by the end of 2009 we will have reduced it enough and stopped it growing so that Isabella can simply be monitored on a regular basis by MRI. Should it regrow - sometimes 6 months later, sometimes 5 years and sometimes never then we will reassess whether to return to this chemo regime, consider radiotheraphy or perhaps the new drugs, currently in trial, will be available. Right now we are pleased with the good progress we are making and happy that Isabella is tolerating medication well. We have 3 more weeks of this and then a break for a couple of weeks.
Well done to all of you who braved the artic temperatures in DC to witness Obama's inauguration. We watched from our hotel room and almost wished we could have been a part of it. Isabella was fascinated. Matilde fell asleep, but at dinner that evening she looked perplexed at the waiter and then asked me "mummy, why is Obama in Florida?" He did bear quite a ressemblance to Obama and apparently it wasn't the first time he'd been told that.
Love,
Emma and Gregorio xxx
We also went over the results of the MRI. The doctors repeated the good news and showed us the visual evidence of where the main brain tumor has shrunk. Some people experience faster shrinkage but this is not necessarily an indication that it will not regrow in the future. Slow and steady, we'll get rid of these tumors over the course of the next year through this current chemo regime. Hopefully by the end of 2009 we will have reduced it enough and stopped it growing so that Isabella can simply be monitored on a regular basis by MRI. Should it regrow - sometimes 6 months later, sometimes 5 years and sometimes never then we will reassess whether to return to this chemo regime, consider radiotheraphy or perhaps the new drugs, currently in trial, will be available. Right now we are pleased with the good progress we are making and happy that Isabella is tolerating medication well. We have 3 more weeks of this and then a break for a couple of weeks.
Well done to all of you who braved the artic temperatures in DC to witness Obama's inauguration. We watched from our hotel room and almost wished we could have been a part of it. Isabella was fascinated. Matilde fell asleep, but at dinner that evening she looked perplexed at the waiter and then asked me "mummy, why is Obama in Florida?" He did bear quite a ressemblance to Obama and apparently it wasn't the first time he'd been told that.
Love,
Emma and Gregorio xxx
