We've been home a few days now and are settling into our routine. I feel about 90% better. Just waiting for energy level and digestive system to come around and hoping to sleep a little better. However, for someone who had some heavy duty chemo about ten days ago, I feel GREAT! Yesterday, I even got to throw some reciever practice at Cameron's football practice. i am somewhat of an honorary coach due to my hugely successful stint with the JV a couple of years ago ... those same coaches are now the varsity coaches.
Liz is doing fine. Never did have that big crash day let down I thought she might have. Energy is still a little zapped as she got hit every bit as hard emotionally as I did physically.
While we were gone, our marvelous friends and family did many amazing things for us in addition to caring for the kids and made it a nice homecoming by doing things like arranging for a houskeeper the day before we arrived, and doing all the laundry (even taking it to a laundrymat ... and there was a lot), cooking meals for the boys, having a landscaper come in and do a ton of work on the yard, having the car washed, brought flowers and even planted them, took the boys to the races, etc. Again, words cannot adequately express our thanks and appreciation. Their generosity is a great example of how to be helpful to others in their time of need.
I will definitely be going back to Houston, at least one more time for more of the same, on September 17. So, I have a few weeks to get back into phenomenal shape. I've got a lot of work to do regarding my diet options (leaning towards quasi-veggie regimen) and need to learn meditation/visualization. Still have more research to do, particularly in regards to a backup plan for treatment options.
I will have scans done just before I leave for Houston, so we won't know 'til then if the treatment successfully shrunk the tumors, or at least stopped their growth/spread. Note: the scan I had done in the hospital showed the largest tumor had grown from 4cm to 6cm in a month, so we started treatment none to soon.
I mentioned in an early update that I had a 1 cm subcutaneous tumor sent to Rational Therapuetics for an assay to determine which cytotoxins appear to work, at least in vitro, against my specific tumor and which don't. Unfortunately the sample I sent them was rather small, so they weren't able to investigate many agents. but they did come up with a couple of very promising options to consider in the future. One was a combination of cisplatin and gemistibene. The other was a non-toxic agent called acetoxy-someting-or-other (I left the paper at the office). Rational Therapuetics has successfully predicted certain agents' effectiveness against certain cancers, when they had not yet been tested for those cancers.