Final IT

Elsa had her last scheduled I.T. procedure today and everything went really well. At this point it's just a waiting game until her scan. I just wanted to do a quick update to say that everything is going really well with our family.

In case people were wondering, Elsa still has some hair. It is very unusual for chemo patients to have any hair at all and she still has a pretty good amount. (The doctors told us she would lose it in the first 3 weeks)  I was convinced that she still looked normal, but after looking back at pictures from this summer it became glaringly obvious to me that she does not look normal. haha On the bright side, once Elsa starts growing some fuzz it will look like she has a lot more hair than she does at that point because she has all these random stragglers that survived the chemo!

That was a little random, I know, but thats how it is.

Peace out

Scan Results

Elsa's scan came back with a 1 cm chunk of active cells. This section lit up on the scan as active (which usually means cancer) because there was cell activity in that spot. There is a scale to see how active the tissue is and this tumor read very low on that scale. The doctor called my mom a little while ago and stated the options. There were a lot of them so I won't list them all. The biggest contenders in the decision were surgery to remove the tumor or to wait 6 weeks to do another scan. The risks for doing the surgery were not worth the benefits of taking it out. There is no way for the doctors to know without going in there whether it is cancer or just a tumor at this point. If they take out the tumor it would be risky because it is back behind her intestines. The benefit to waiting is that the doctors will be able to see if the tumor is still growing and changing or if it is just calcified tissue. The conclusion was that waiting the 6 weeks and reassesing the situation would be the best option.
One thing that I was worried about was Elsa's recovery. Every cycle of chemo has been a harder and slower recovery than the last. If Elsa went right back to having chemo regularly again she would have a hard time recovering because her body is so weak. Now that we are waiting before (potentially) having Elsa go through chemo again, there will be a chance for Elsa to recover and get stronger before the next cycle.

January 11th will be the next scan. If it shows that the tumor has grown then Elsa will most likely start chemo right away.
For right now I'm just glad to have a peaceful and hospital free Christmas season

elsa still has a cancerous tumor about 1 cm and we'll have to do about as much chemo as we've already done. i'm at work so i'll update in detail this evening.