A New Round of Consultations – Update 1

This past weekend Christy and I spent visiting family in Massachusetts. Certainly a highlight of the trip was an afternoon out with my sister doing some lobstering! That’s some hard work, and I can’t believe she goes out most days and hauls hundreds of traps! She earns my admiration.

Spending the afternoon out on the ocean and revisiting the waters I grew up in on Cohasset harbor was such a great break away. It brought back so many happy memories from childhood, swimming at the beach, sailing races outside the harbor, fishing for flounder from the channel markers, and summer after summer of growing up in such an amazing little town! It was a great weekend.

The only frustrating part was that Dana Farber Cancer Center in Boston couldn’t schedule me while we were there and set up their consult for me this Friday. So that means driving back up to Boston, visiting the hospital, staying over, and driving back to PA Saturday morning. It will be tons of traffic on Friday, so hopefully the consult will be worthwhile. It is one of the leading cancer centers in the country. I’ll post an update afterwards with whatever they say. We’re hoping for some new ideas…

Also, my oncologist in Bethlehem decided to do some tests to see if I would qualify for a new branch of immunotherapy. This is a newer treatment that has been working well with melanoma and lung cancer. Two weeks ago, there was a conference and they opened it up for stomach cancer, and also decided to allow some trials with patients with other forms of cancer if their tumors match a specific DNA structure (or something like that). So I’m being tested to see if I’m a match or not. Not sure how long that will take to process.

So there are a few logs in the fire and we’ll wait and see if any produce new options.

Thanks again for your prayers.

Sandy.

6/10/2016

So today we met with the oncologist at Dana-Farber. The good news is that our doctor in Bethlehem knew all the options for my condition. Of course that means that one of the best cancer centers in the country confirmed that there really are no other options and that pancreatic cancer is still one of those conditions where medical science is still quite limited. So we press on and wait for test results for immunotherapy…