Update on my Father

Last week I accompanied my father to his PET scan.  The scan is pretty much a walk in the park but it gives us a little bit of quality time together.  We always go out to lunch which he loves and I love it because I know that he's eaten at least one good meal.  It's not that he can't cook, cause he can, but for him it's trouble so he'll do something easy instead of what is really good for him.

We had our follow-up yesterday with the Dr. and here is what is going on.  
There are two spots in the groin area that are lit up...that means that there is "activity" and that means he is out of remission.  It's not that his current treatment is not working...it's just not working as well as it has and so we have to change his treatment.

The Dr. wants him to have a bone marrow scan on the 7th of Oct.  If they find the cancer in his bone marrow then they want to do a new chemo treatment and then he'll go back to the Retuxan.  But instead of his Retuxan treatment being 4 treatments every 6 months he'll probably go to 1 treatment every 2 months or every other month.  That is still to be determined.  But this is all in hopes that they can once again get on top of this cancer. 

If they don't find any cancer in his bone marrow then they just want to do radiation.  No problem with that except that my father does not want to do radiation.  And that is because he is pretty sure that my mother's health really started to go downhill after her radiation treatment.  And it would be with the same Dr. who treated my mother and I tend to want to agree with him.  It's his life after all and he does have a right to decide how he wants to be treated. I think that he'd much rather (regardless of the outcome) just do the chemo and Retuxan. 

He's understandably disappointed in his results.  We had gotten use to "no changes" and so you sort of forget that he's sick other than his physical appearance.  And by that I mean weight.  He's pretty skinny and I think he would look better with about 15 more pounds on him and he agrees.  It's just hard for him to put on weight.  If I only had that problem. 

So that's where we stand right now.  I'm going to hope that the cancer has not spread to his bone marrow...I think there is a good chance that it hasn't because all his blood work looks good.  His Dr. actually said, if someone looked at his blood work they wouldn't be able to tell that he had cancer at all.   So fingers crossed, that this all turns out better than we anticipate.  Onward....