1/14/05 / Friday

Today I went down for my radiation treatment and a visit with my primary oncology doctor. The radiation is getting easier to handle, as time passes I am getting use to the confinement of my positioning. The best I can tell my breathing is getting better therefore it must be working.

Meeting with my doctor shed some new light in the direction of treatment. What I'm not sure has ever been mentioned in this web site is that the cancer had spread to my lymphnodes (the glands in your neck). The cancer in my lymphnodes was dare I say under control and had looked liked it disappeared after the first few chemo treatments. Since they have stopped the chemo only doing half of what they had hoped because of my bodys negative reaction, my doctor is concerned that we are concentrating focus of radiation treatment to my sinus only and the cancer could be creeping back into my lymphnodes. She has decided to restart one part of the four medicines in my chemo treatment once a week to try to keep it in check. She is also counting down the days (14) until radiation is complete, the day after it's complete she is going to admit me to the hospital to get underway with a massive high dose chemo which is the first part of what is called a stem cell transplant.

Stem cell transplant is replacing the treatment which used to be known as a bone marrow transplant. The best I can try to explain is the high dose chemo kills your white blood cells (your bone marrow)down to zero. At this point I am obviously at high risk for getting very sick so you are confined to your room and are very limited to exposure. Then they hook me up to a machine which my blood is being filtered through and mechanically they take out and store the stem cells out of my blood. When my blood count gets down to 0 they reintroduce the filtered stem cells where it will regenerate white blood cells in my bone marrow hopefully cancer free. It should be about twenty days in the hospital. It's confusing and I am trying to understand this stuff, I hope my explanation makes some sense to you all.

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