Chemo 42% Complete

Today's chemo treatment went without incident, with all blood counts being quite good.

PET scan results

A PET scan, or Positron Emission Tomography scan, is an imaging technique that allows physicians to examine many organs of the body and is helpful in diagnosing many diseases, such as cancer. Other techniques, such as CT scan or MRI, only show organ structure, where as PET shows organ structure and function.

Yesterday my PET scan showed all of the malignant lymph nodes to be inactive - in other words, none of the cells there showed any signs of actively using energy. This is excellent news and the hematologists were quite happy. However, because such a scan does not guarantee that there are not some cells that are still active on a very low level, the chemotherapy must continue as scheduled for the full 12 treatments.

Other news was also good; the white blood cell count remains excellent, so instead of having five shots every two weeks of the G-CSF formula which regulates this, I now only need four..

One piece of bad news is that my lung function continues to deteriorate, so that they may still need to alter the chemotherapy formula to remove this drug from the cocktail of four I am given. However, the doctor said he was not too fussed about this, especially given the good PET results...

NOTE: the scan above is not mine, just one I pulled from the internet.

Snake on the Back Porch!

Tonight our friends Debbie and Ottmar and their daughter Sophie, with their friend Frances, visited for dinner. What a great surprise to be able to show them a young carpet python happily sitting in our verandah roof! We have named the snake Sophie in honor of our young friend... we hope she (the snake!) stays around for a while...

Pink Wig for Pink Morning Tea

Today in Psychology we had a Pink Morning Tea to raise money for breast cancer research. I baked a special pink lamb cake in honor of the event, and also wore a pink wig, courtesy of my friend Virginia!

Benefits of Candied Ginger

One of the things that seems to help a lot with nausea is candied ginger. The second day after chemo is the hardest - the day I feel the weakest and where I must not try to move around too much. This second day after chemo has not been too bad, thanks to lots of cable TV (today's highlight was Columbo) and candied ginger!

Zamboni Gaining Weight

Zamboni is doing very well on his diet of premium ground beef (mostly eaten raw). He has put on almost 8 oz. in the last 6 days, and has not vomited once! All very promising for the little shmoop...

Fourth Chemo Done!

Today I am 1/3 of the way done with the chemotherapy treatments! After the chemo was finished I received my usual dose of sublingual (under the tongue administration) lorazepam (or ativan). This helps dampen the senses, helping tremendously with nausea. I also have some which I take each night for the two days after chemo, and it really seems to help control the nausea and allow for a solid night of sleep.

Back at Work!

I'm officially back at work 50% time now, coming in mostly on the non-chemo weeks but also the day before chemo (which is when I feel best). Mondays I am usually at the hospital, which makes it easy to catch up on research meetings with my collaborators who work at the Royal Brisbane Hospital and at UQ's School of Population Health. Today had a series of meetings with my collaborators on the Women's Health Australia study, a 20 year longitudinal study of three groups of women (young, mid-aged and older). Today we were planning a series of papers to write on data from the mid-aged and older groups...

A lobster Feast!

Today our friends John & Kelly Steen, and their new son Harry, came over and fixed us a feast of Tasmanian lobsters! It was a terrific meal, and Harry got to meet the cats!

More Bird Feeding

Had a quiet Saturday feeding the birds and reading the papers....

Zamboni's Bad Diet Comes Back to Bite Him!

Well, our vet Marcus gave us the scoop on Zamboni today. An ultrasound revealed scarring in the intestines, probably from an over-reactive immune system. It is most likely inflammatory bowel disease, managed with antibiotics and a change in diet to nothing but beef! So the little white minx has gorged himself on fresh minced beef ever since (and seems to be doing better!)

Zamboni's Turn for a Medical Condition!

In our house we all take turns being sick, and now Zamboni is sick again! He recently successfully underwent radioactive iodine treatment for thyroid cancer, but now he is losing weight and the vet thinks it is something called "inflammatory bowel disease" which apparently is quite treatable. Gromit, who has MAST cell cancer, is also being successfully treated on a maintenance dose of prednisone.

Good News about Shots

I have to have shots to keep my white blood cell count stable so that I can continue to receive the chemotherapy treatments exactly 14 days apart and on schedule. However, the shots have tended to have very bad side effects for me earlier in my treatments. But now the latest course of shots (a different formulation) has resulted in no side effects. So this is terrific!

Excellent News for Tim

Tim submitted a paper for an important conference for his research, the Danish Research Unit for Industrial Dynamics (DRUID). Today he was notified that the Organizing Committee for the DRUID Summer Conference 2007 have shortlisted his paper for the Best Young Scholar Paper Award for 2007. So Tim is heading to Copenhagen in June! He'll be gone a week, during a non-treatment week for me. Everyone at the business school was very excited to hear this great news!

Excellent News on Lymphoma Progress

Well, there is good news on the lymphoma front. A chest x-ray has revealed that the central mass in my chest has shrunk considerably! This is very good news as it shows that the cancer is being quite responsive to treatment. Also, although there seems to be some impact on my lung functioning (currently my blood gas exchange rate in my lungs is down by a third from what you would expect of someone my age and height), overall the chemo does not seem to be having too many side effects. So the doctors are very encouraged. I will have lung function tests every other chemo treatment to track that finding. At the sixth chemo treatment I will have another chest CT scan, so they can measure by volume exactly how much the tumor in the middle of my chest has shrunk...

Zamboni Helps!

Sleeping is an excellent way to recover from the chemo, and Zamboni is always ready to help!

Third Chemotherapy Finished

Today I completed the third chemotherapy treatment - so I am 25% done!

:)

I feel lucky to be getting care at a hospital and medical research centre which does such excellent work - below is a sample of the research ongoing at the Royal Brisbane complex.

The Queensland Institute of Medical Research (QIMR) is one of the largest medical research institutes in the southern hemisphere, and is recognised worldwide for the quality of its research. Over the last 60 years, QIMR has broadened its scope to include the immunological, biological and molecular basis of a wide range of infectious diseases, cancers and other disorders. Other important research areas are in epidemiology, the study of the environmental, lifestyle & genetic factors that contribute to disease incidence among populations. It is currently Australia’s largest medical research institute, with over 700 scientists, students and support staff under one roof. QIMR works with the World Health Organization (WHO) and has close links with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the USA.

Over many years, QIMR has contributed substantially to the bank of knowledge on diseases worldwide. In 2001, QIMR demonstrated the first evidence of a genetic link to breast cancer predisposition.

Technology developed by 2006 Australian of the Year Professor Ian Frazer, the late Dr Jian Zhou and their team from UQ’s Centre for Immunology and Cancer Research helped create world’s first cervical cancer vaccine, now available to women in Australia and the United States. Cervical cancer kills about 270,000 women worldwide each year.

For more on QIMR's cancer research, go to
http://www.qimr.edu.au/research/topics/cancer.html