Thought you all would like and update on what is going on with Joe. As you may know, he started radiation last Wed. So far he is having no ill effects from it. His blood sugars have been a bit crazy but the doctor said that isn't the radiation yet, it is probably just stress. He sees the radiation oncologists every Wed. He leaves every morning at 7:30 am and is back to work by 9:30 and works a few hours. It is looking unlikely that he will get any chemo because of his heart. The radiation will not kill the cancer by itself but it will shrink the tumors and make his life much longer and more comfortable.
We have gotten the first results of cat scans back. They show a 4.5 cm mass on outside of one kidney, which we don't know what it is yet. Hopefully it is not also cancer. The kidney and ureter are also swollen on one side. This is caused by one of the masses partly blocking one of the ureters. In the bladder there are multiple tumors, the largest are 5 cm and 5.8 cm.
The good news is that although we were told before that his heart is enlarged, it isn't. That is good news.
The anniversary of Brenna's adoption happened in April. We wanted to do something special to celebrate but it is hard when Joe cannot do much physically. Well, this last Saturday we finally found something. We went to a wildlife drive through safari in Cherokee county, about 50 miles south of us. It was well worth the drive. We paid $15 per person and were each given a big bag of food pellets to feed the animals. They of course know that the car things have yummy food so most of them come hurrying over when they see a car. We drove around for well over 2 hours through this thing and saw most of the animals on the list. You have to be really careful because most of them will put their heads in the car if you let them and snatch anything in reach, your glasses, your hat, whatever.
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| There are two kinds of deer here, I don't remember all the types |
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| As you can see, he stuck his head in the car before we could get the window up. This was a miniture donkey |
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| Pretty, huh? |
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| They came in herds and snuffled around for our pellets |
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| Ether an emu or a rea. These dudes were really fast. The window was going up really fast. |
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| The most agressive though were the zebras. Many of them got their heads in the car. |
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| While I was snapping this one another one poked his head around the corner and right into Brenna's lap |
When will you find out what type of tumor is in his Kidneys?
ReplyDeleteHeather,
ReplyDeleteWe already know, it is high grade malignant Kidney cancer. What we don't know is the depth of the tumors into the bladder wall. This would tell the stage. We would have to do a biopsy to determine that but we cannot because of his heart. There are two types of bladder cancer, from what I can understand, the one is slow growing and the other is high grade malignant.... and their are two stages, basically, of bladder cancer. The one just stays on the surface and the other is muscle invasive. Even though we cannot determine the level of the muscle invasiveness we do know that it is muscle invasive by deduction. Only the muscle invasive kind will be strong enouph to block a ureter.
Some encouraging news is that the high grade malignant is far easier to treat, especially as we cannot remove it, the slow growing doesn't respond to radiation or chemo hardly at all. If it was that we would not be able to fight it at all. The other good thing is that bladder cancer does not normally metastisize, if it does, it does it normally in earlier stages. Because this is obviously in later stages and has not metastisized, at least as of May, then there is a good chance it will not.
The hope is that we will shrink the tumors and get the ureter unblocked so that the kidney can recover and basically control the growth so that the tumors don't cause other health problems.
Hope this answers your questions.