Still In Remission

We went and saw Dr. Berryman on Friday and he said that Tanner's lab work looks good and that there's no sign of active cancer.  It's always such a relief to have the confirmation from the doctor that everything is still okay.  The nerves always take over, to some degree, when we are waiting to hear the results of the reports even though, if something was changing, Tanner's weekly labwork should indicate the difference. I always remember that fateful day when they did the full body scan and discovered the hundreds of lesions, the Oncologist told us that if they were just going by bloodwork, Tanner seemed to be a completely healthy young man. Since that statement, I don't trust the weekly labwork to be our only indicator for how Tanner's cancer is proceeding.

He recommends that Tan continues with maintenance treatment as he's been doing for over two years now with no changes at this time and return to Dallas next March.

He said that the platelet count was a little lower than when we were there four months ago but I guess that's to be expected.  Tanner has been undergoing chemotherapy for 28 months now.  The first six months was daily chemo with only short occassional breaks and then for maintenance he's been taking the weekly treatments for more than two years now.  Twenty-eight months of chemo...

They also ran labwork on Trevor to see if he's a match for Tanner but they have to wait to send it off until Monday so it will be a while before we get the results and discover if he's a stem cell match.  Dr. Berryman said that MM is "prone to relapse" so, if Trevor is a match, he wants to go ahead and collect and have the cells frozen for future use if it should ever be needed.

He explained that if Tanner were to relapse, we would want to do something different than the treatment that has already been done in the past.  He said that Tanner's own stem cells are the "flawed" cells that allowed him to get cancer in the first place.  If he should ever need another transplant, he feels it would be beneficial to use his brother's cells rather than his own cells that were frozen in Arkansas.

We came home from the doctor's appointment and I packed up a backpack and went and spent the weekend with my cousin Kathy.  It was going to be just an overnight visit but I ended up staying the whole weekend and just got back home this afternoon.  It was a much needed break.  Just what I needed...  A chance to get away for a couple of days and let all my worries go for a while.


You can close your eyes to the things you do not want to see, but you cannot close your heart to the things you do not want to feel...