No Clarity Yet

We met with Dr. D. today, and actually had a pretty positive meeting. Kurt is going to go ahead and stay on this chemo regimen for a bit, so he is going to get treatment tomorrow. Meanwhile, Dr. D. is going to present Kurt's case to the Johns Hopkins tumor board again (he did that at the beginning of treatment), with a special focus on interventional radiology. Evidently, those are the people who do all the wacky liver focused treatments. Dr. D. encouraged Kurt to explore the yttrium-90 treatment at the University of Maryland, where they have substantial experience with that protocol. Also, we learned that Dr. D. knows the people at MD Anderson who met with us, so they are going to talk soon and hopefully keep talking during this transition phase. Dr. D. seemed to agree with us that 8 more months of chemo is probably too long to wait and that we should start looking at something to target the liver...so long as we can do it concurrent with chemo.

Also, Kurt got another call from NIH today -- we are going over to see them on Friday. As I think we mentioned before, there is a doctor at NIH with a pretty cutting-edge surgical approach. Surgery is risky, but we are interested to hear what they have to say.

So, we still don't have much clarity on the path forward, but we seem to be getting away from the chemo-in-perpetuity approach that has characterized the last 9 months. This exploratory phase is unsettling...it is sort of like a bizarro game of Deal or No Deal. You know that if you are going to get the million-dollar case, you have to open cases with huge dollar figures, but it still sucks when the big numbers come off the board. It is hard to ask about treatment after treatment only to learn that we can't have it ... but somewhere out there is the path to victory and we have to weed out the wrong ones to find it.

Meanwhile, Kurt is back on the steroids in preparation for treatment tomorrow. I think he is making faces at himself in the mirror right now, while attempting to persuade me that a Ren & Stimpy marathon is in order. Here's hoping the sleeping pills kick in soon!