Lymph Nodes

Well, I was hoping to show you guys a picture of the adnopothy surrounding my porta hepatis, but - alas - I sent them on up to NIH.

I had been a bit worried about them since the last week's radiology report showed that they grew in size by 50% in the 4 weeks between my pre-Australia and post-Australia scans. However, I looked at them w/ my Dr. today, and they don't look so bad. Also, he explained that these are, basically, enlarged lymph nodes. It could be tumors that's enlarging them, bit it could also be swelling caused by the body's fight against the cancer elsewhere - there's no way to know. Either way, it's not good that they're getting bigger, but it's not as bad as it could be. So, the deal is that we're staying the course w/ Avastin and 5-FU/etc.

In other news, this past July 4th, I helped my other cancer-budy Andrea check off one of her bucket-list items (not that I want her to get through the list... maybe just most of the way through). Here's before (check out the look :):

During....
And after... We had a great ride. It was her first, ever, motorcyle ride and I know it helped that we were BOTH chock-full of opiate pain killers.

While we're at it. Mom and dad saw us on our open-air moterized vehicles and decied to ride their own down to the 4th-of-July picnic. It didn't seem like quite the same thing, but they seemed to be enjoying themselves.

We're back

Well, we're back from down under and had a great visit with the Montoya's. Here's picture from a rooftop restaurant in Sydney where we enjoyed our last 3 days.

The trip was great, and I felt stronger and stronger each day; my Drs are thrilled w/ how "healthy" I'm looking and feeling (I am too). The flight home was good as well. Getting into LA 6 hours before we left Australia was kind of weird, and then seeing the sun set a second time on the LA - DC flight was weird as well. We all adjusted quite quickly to the new time (I think the time change was so different and the trip home so long, that the body doesn't really know what to do, so current time is good enough.)

I'm writing this blog from UVA where I'm "catching up" on my chemo. Some tentative good news (remember the last good news) is that I had a scan this AM and it seems like all the tumors have remain unchanged in size. The exception, once again, is that the oncologist really couldn't find the 2 tumors in the abdomen, so we need to wait for the radiology report on those; however, this time I'm reasonably hopeful that the report will show no change. Of course, shrinkage would be the best news; but I'm very happy and thankful w/ "stable."

As always, thanks for your prayers; I KNOW that they make a difference.