MD Anderson visit

Plans aren't any fun if they don't change, right? Sandy's plan was to be in Houston at MD Anderson through early next week. However, Wednesday, after meeting with the first (and only) doctor, she found out she just needed to have a few tests run as kind of a baseline marker. The treatment was already determined, seemingly before she even arrived. In some ways, that is a blessing, because the prescribed treatment is nearly the same as what she heard from the KU oncologist, and it's nice when experts agree. In other ways, it was a bit frustrating because she had hoped for several options from which to choose.

Starting early November, Sandy will have one 6-hour day of chemo every two weeks. The reason to wait until early November is so that she is six weeks past her surgery date; certain chemo drugs can interfere with the healing process, and she needs to be at full strength for this next leg of the journey. Treatments will be here in town. At this point, she will travel back to Houston in three months for another round of tests/scans to look for changes. Since none of the earlier scans detected the tumors, the most the scans will reveal is whether the tumors have grown. At Monday's KU appointment, Sandy learned that the KU Tumor Review Board doctors had reviewed slides from scrapings taken in late August here in town, and found there to be cancer cells. That news was both surprising and not surprising - finally there's a confirmation of the presence of cancer, yet questions remain why it was not determined the first time the slides were reviewed. It seems that pathology is not necessarily a black and white science.

The best way to tell if treatment is working is by how Sandy feels. So far she hasn't had a great appetite, and she's still fairly fatigued. We keep reminding her that the nearly foot-long scar on her torso points to why she's not at 100% yet! She had a major surgery, and recovery takes time.

Medically speaking, there is not a cure for bile duct cancer. Medically speaking, the best scenario is for the continual chemo to hold the cancer at bay, keeping it from spreading anywhere else or blocking the open duct. Medically speaking, the outlook is not so great.

Boy are we glad we are not limited to what medicine has to offer! There have been many numbers thrown around the past few weeks, many statistics about this type of cancer.  But there are numerous factors that affect patient outcomes, and even more than that, we serve a really big God.

Both the KU doctor and the MDA doctor agree that Sandy ought to feel well enough to continue working while receiving treatment.

I'm calling this journey a blessing in disguise. God promises it will work for our good, but right now that "good" is so well disguised that the blessing part is nearly unrecognizable. That doesn't change the fact of the blessing, however.  We'll just keep looking.