Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Toxic beyond belief

Paul's chemo is heavy duty stuff, so much it's EPOCH. EPOCH takes the standard CHOP regimen and kicks it up. The nurses wear special gowns and gloves, plus masks when they hang the IV bags of it. After 3 rounds of chemo the good news is that Paul is in remission! Yay!!

That's the best response we could have hoped for. The big downside is that the scans also found Paul has portal vein thrombosis (PVT) - a blood clot in the vein coming out of the intestines and spleen going into the liver. Why does Paul have PVT? Excellent question! And we don't have a good answer for it. Apparently Paul had a subclinical (like my fancy new medical term?) condition with his liver. The chemo accelerated whatever this disease is and caused Paul to develop full blown liver disease.

Which brings us to now - we're sitting in a patient room at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston while Paul gets his 4th round extremely modified chemo. So modified that they've taken out pretty much everything from the regimen except the steroids and a drug called Cytoxan - they call this new regimen Hyper-Cytoxan. We've also had a visit this week at the Liver Center at Baylor College of Medicine. Of course that means more tests and more waiting for answers, and you guessed it! More driving for me!





No comments:

Post a Comment