I'm Feeling Pretty "Stable"

So yesterday was "the" day I'd been dreading for the last couple of weeks. We got results from the first set of scans I've had since finishing the first 2 rounds of IL-2. I spent the weekend freaking out, suddenly convinced that the cancer was basically crawling all over me, and trying to distract myself by planning a vacation. This culminated in me uncontrollably bawling my eyes out while sitting in a theater of children watching "Up" on Monday. Dade had thought the movie would get my mind off of things .... well, not so much.

Yesterday we drove into Boston to Beth Israel to await the news. My blood pressure was 150/110 by the time we got called in to see the doctor and I was literally breaking out in hives. A familiar face from the time I spent in the hospital, Virginia, came in with the radiology report and told us that basically it was "a mixed bag" but there was no bad news. In my last round of scans 8 weeks ago there had been a small nodule in my lungs which was no longer showing up. It's gone. There had also been a "shadow" in my liver which we all assume is a cluster of blood vessels which for some reason is no longer showing up. The tumors which they were really following for the treatment are all stable. They haven't changed at all, but no growth is a positive thing! The only semi-disappointing news is that there "may" be a couple of new small nodes forming right under my skin. The good news with those is that they are easily removable.

Soooooo..... we wait another 4 weeks and do some more scans. We are looking for shrinkage on those. If we get shrinkage, I go back in for another 2 weeks to repeat the entire course of treatment. If I'm still stable, but nothing has actually gotten smaller, we have a talk about whether to repeat the treatment, look for other new treatments on the horizon, or just wait for another 8-12 weeks and rescan. If there has been growth, well then we know it isn't working and go on to another plan. Just knowing that there is another plan out there is a comfort. All in all, it was a good outcome and I woke up today feeling the anxiety fading away. I get to go back to normal for another couple of weeks. Living between scans is an interesting ordeal...

In celebration of all of this, we are actually going to be holding a contest over on weddingbee.com. We're giving away 100 of our new thank you notes (which happen to feature a little bee on them.) Stop by there and enter! It should be up on the site later today.