The Waiting Game

I am following my oncologist's suggestion to take a tour of the academic facilities in order to get some treatment ideas and to see if there might be a good clinical trial that would be right for me. So, I have plans to go see people at Stanford, UCSF, UC Davis, and MD Anderson in Houston. I have an appointment with Dr. Fisher at Stanford next week. The other three facilities won't even let me schedule an appointment until they get all of my records. Hopefully they are getting what they need. I actually have copies of all of my surgical notes, pathology reports, scan reports, scan images (CDs), and blood work. I don't have copies of recent clinical notes from my oncologist and chemotherapy flow sheets. In the case of MD Anderson, I have had to call or fax each facility and request records to be sent to them. The other facilities are making their own requests.

Next week we will see what Stanford has to say. I hope it won't take too long to get into the other places. My oncologist is prepared to try a lung cancer drug on me (suggested by the Target Now assay done a couple of years ago) but that will depend on insurance approval. Also I may not want to start a new treatment just yet in case a clinical trial needs me to be currently treatment-free in order to enroll. I'll let him make that call. My appointment with him is next week too.

David's work also has a Critical Case Advanced Medical program where someone collects all of my medical data and finds expert medical opinions from across the country. So, we will also have some input from that soon.

So, that's what's going on. Not much of anything, really. This kind of thing takes time and the upcoming holidays aren't going to help matters much.

My CEA has been bouncing around a bit. It was 10.2 on October 11, 67.9 on October 28, 39.3 on November 13, and 45.6 on November 18.

I'm still feeling fine. My energy is good, my hair is growing, my cheeks are still rosy. :-)