Good news from my dad

I received this health update email from my dad recently. He continues to beat the odds and I'm so grateful for that. I just wanted to share this since many of you ask me how he is doing.

Dear wonderful family . . .

I just had a new CT scan which positively
confirmed my hope that no new cancer has
appeared nor traveled to any new places, and
only some slight enlargement has taken place in
the same, old, small nodules and lesions that
have been in my liver all along.

To quote the radiologist's overall impression
and summary at the conclusion of her report,
"Metastatic disease to the liver which is slightly
increased" (since the last scan).

Such slight increase is consistent with and explains
the slow climb of my CEA in recent months that I've
mentioned in the last two reports. It's pretty much
what we expected. It's also what we hoped for - it
could well have been worse. (The CEA is the tumor
marker that we track in my bloodwork which, along
with CT scans, has helped us to know when to begin
each new round of chemo to attack and beat down
the cancer again and again over the past four years.)

So far, so good. We've done it three times and
this next round of chemo will be the fourth.

Did I ever mention I have a great doctor?

On average, each new round of treatment involves
the infusion of a chemo cocktail on a weekly out-
patient basis over a period of about 6 months. I sit
in a comfy recliner while the nurses fuss over me and
pump me full of the required doses of chemo and
various meds from an IV stand. It usually takes
about 4 hours each time.

There's individual cable TV and earphones for
each patient, a fully-stocked refrigerator and wrap
around floor-to-ceiling windows for fourth-floor
views out over the buildings and treetops of down-
town Billings. There's even a stone fireplace (on the
fourth floor yet) to make it cozy in the wintertime.
The IV stand is on wheels so I can wander around
and visit at will, get in trouble and even go down to
the lunch counter on the first floor for soup and a
sandwich. I just love this place and everyone who
works here. I tell them that if Shirlee ever throws
me out I'm gonna move in.

Then in the 10 or 12 months of "remission" in between
such 6-month rounds of chemo, I still go in every two
weeks for "maintenance" infusions of my wonder drugs
Erbitux and Avastin which are technically not chemo and
which I've described in past reports. That's what I've
been doing for the past 11 months and that's what's
been keeping the cancer at bay for so long.

So in another couple of months we'll be starting up
another round of chemo to again knock down the
newly growing cancer. I'll let you know when that
occurs, but today I just wanted to tell you about the
relatively good results of the new CT scan.

All in all however, there is no guarantee to any of this.
I've been VERY lucky so far. But one of these times
the cancer is going to figure out what we're doing and
become resistant to the particular chemo we're using
and we'll have to come up with a new plan. Or it might
spread somewhere else thus to compound our problem.
Or my blood could become so damaged by the chemo
in my bone marrow that it may become impossible to
continue chemo treatments at all which would leave the
cancer unchecked and unrestrained. We're using the
best war strategy we can design and I've got the best
field general there is.

You may recall that when I was first diagnosed in June
of 2006, the statistics were that only 5% of the patients
with stage IV colon cancer (like me) survived 5 years.
I just passed the four-year mark and based on how well
I feel now it would be my layman's guess that I may make
it at least another year. If so, I will indeed join that elite
5% group that I so strongly aspired to back then, and
of course we'll try to stretch it out even further still.

And I'm sure that continued fine-tuning and improvement
of treatment strategies and techniques may have improved
the statistics and helped me stay in the game over these past
four years. On the other hand, when it turns ugly as it may
well do at some point, I suppose it could come on real
strong and fast.

We'll see. Hang in there. I'm doin' fine.

Love, Dad