Moving Forward

Hello everyone. I will try and explain things the best that I can in terms of what lies ahead for the next 8 weeks or so. We have met with Dr. Unger and he explained the treatment protocol for our situation. Pam is to have another chemo. treatment this week (Feb. 6th she goes in to the hospital for 3 days again). After this treatment she will receive a shot of something called Nupegin? (sp) that will stimulate the production of T-cells. They will wait a few days and watch for them to increase in the blood. When they do, Pam will go to the hospital and be hooked up to a machine that acts a bit like dialysis only it will filter these T-cells from her blood so they can freeze them for later use (you will understand why in a bit). This is refered to as the stem cell harvest. She will then continue to recover this round of chemo. and in a couple of weeks get another PET scan to see if it has indeed removed all the cancer. Regardless of the results, she will soon after (1st week of March maybe) be getting the high dose of chemotherapy. This will reduce her white blood cell count to Zero. At that time they will transplant her T-cells back to her to give her some protection for the few weeks it will take to start building them up again. It will be a few months before she starts to feel a bit more normal. The goal of all of this is that the cancer will be gone and we can start doing periodic scans to check that it stays away.
Obviously there are quite a few things that can become problematic with the whole process that I just tried to explain, but they are too many to list for everyone. The big ones are fever, or infection while white blood cell counts are low. Pam will either be in the hospital for 2-3 weeks during this time, or be staying in Burlington close to the hospital (we live about 20 min too far away).
We went to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston last week for a consult. The doctors that we met with were very pleased with our treatment plans and what has been done so far. They did not feel that Pam needed to be in Boston for her further treatments, so we are going to proceed up here.
We once again would like to thank you all for your amazing support and efforts. A special thanks to Jeff and Stan for putting together the hoop night at CVU, very class act. Your thoughts, efforts, and actions do not go unnoticed! We love them, they help us through the dark days!
That being said, the next two months are going to be very difficult on Pam and the boys. She will be spending quite a bit of time in the hospital and they will be missing their mommy. We are going to do the best we can to keep there life normal but are prepared for the wheels to fall off. It will be a challenge and we will continue to need all of your support. I wish we could just fast forward to May and have it all over! Instead we will be having our own "March Madness".
Once again thank you all for everything,
Troy and Pam.