Kris, Dave and the Lumps: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Prequel:
Kris saw Dr. Jones last Thursday as a follow up to her biopsy surgery... he was 'ho hum' about things as her recovery from the surgery is going fine.

The Good:
Saw Dr. Moran (Oncologist) yesterday afternoon. Once again he was... guarded but, in my opinion, not as much as last time. The thing I was most worried about was the brain scan as it had implications I didn't even want to consider. Dr. Moran talked about everything throughout the conversation except the Brain scan... finally, at the end, I asked him if his lack of talk about the Brain scan meant that it was clear and he confirmed that there was nothing on the Brain scan... well, there was evidence of the usual stuff, just nothing tumor like.

The Bad:
He's decided on two drugs. One was Avastin and he described this drug as being about as difficult to tolerate as the Herceptin, which Kris took totally in stride. The other is in the Taxol/Taxotere family of drugs and it will mean that she will lose her hair, again. She's decided she's only allowed to have hair about 2" in length! :) The down side is that this means she'll have to have another port installed. This will happen in the next two weeks followed fairly immediately by her first treatment.

The Ugly:
To be honest, the Ugly we already know about. It's what we don't know. Basically the cancer is being more tenacious than we'd all like and we are, to a certain extent, shooting in the dark. They don't have a tumor to aim at, and thus they don't have a lot of material to experiment with to come up with a good solid plan of attack. The current plan is to basically hit the system with the options we have left in hopes that it will kill the cancer. The only other option is to just sit back and wait for it to express itself in another tumor. Which runs the very real risk of waiting for it to metastasize, which it has not done. I asked and he agreed that it's entirely possible that the Herceptin was keeping the cancer at bay but, it's obviously not killing it so he doesn't seem to be enthused about using that drug again.