Alan’s Army

Whoops sorry - Alan and I are helping Stephen move and it occurred to me that I had not sent this.

OK, we are somewhere over the Atlantic ocean about 5 hours into the 8pm Monday flight to Germany.  There’s no room to get a laptop out so I can’t get any work done, but there’s always room for the Blackberry, so I can get a long overdue update out to you all.  The seating is so cramped and causing me such pain I simply can’t sit anymore so I’m standing in the back of the plane typing this.

We saw the hot-shot oncologist in Philly a number of weeks back.  She is the real expert as she is not a general oncologist but only works on brain tumors.  She didn’t have a new trial or protocol available for Alan, but she said that this wasn’t such a bad thing.  She has been involved in dozens of these trials and to date the only one that showed positive results was Temodar which is the drug they have Alan on.  So it would seem that even if a trial did come available, we ought to stick with the Temodar.  She asked that we get Alan’s checkup MRIs in the HUP system in order that she could seem them if necessary.  Apparently nasty looking things on a scan might simply be dead cancer cells that would eventually be absorbed by the body, but her expertise may be required to recognize it.

<OK - now I’m actually half way BACK across the Atlantic Ocean - sorry for the delay - busy, busy.

We saw the regular oncologist two Mondays ago in Philly.  Alan will start his next round of chemo on the 22nd.  The Temodar is being bumped up from 200 mg to 385 mg.  He will take it for five days then have 28 days off before the next 5 days start.  He will be on it in increasing dosages depending on what his blood tests show.

The next day we were off to the eye doctors in Newark.  The neuro-opthamologist was pleased with Alan’s eyes.  The low-vision doctor did a bunch of testing and Alan’s eyesight has improved slightly.  With magnifying lenses he was able to make out letters to a 20/300 level.  It’s not a lot of improvement, but its improvement nevertheless - praise God!

Many thanks to everyone for their continued prayers!

God Bless,

Andrew

My most sincere apologies to everyone.

Once Alan’s daily treatment regimen finished everything else in my life came crashing in and I’ve been busy beyond belief with cool stuff like 2009 IT budgets (I really mean cool, there’s nothing like a good spreadsheet.)  The trip to the shore was nice, but I saw the ocean for about 10 minutes and spent most of my time on the laptop.

This will be a short note too, sorry.

Alan is doing fine.  We are in Philly at the oncologist setting up his next round of chemo which will be the week of Sept. 22nd.

Tomorrow we go to Newark to see the eye surgeon and the low-vision doctor.

The mobility specialist from the NJ Commission for the Blind is in theory showing up at the house on Friday, but since it’s been three months since first contacting the commission, I’m not holding my breath.  The occupational therapist has been to the house twice now, so I’m not sure why the disparity in responsiveness.

We just found out that we need to come back to Philly early Friday morning for Alan’s MRI because they messed up the appointment for today.

Sigh

Hopefully I can give you all a thorough update on things like the hot-shot oncologist visit and the fundraiser in Maine next week while on an 8 hour flight to Germany for business.

Anyway, I hope everyone is well, thanks for your continued prayers and God bless.

Andrew