Thursday, August 20, 2009

Iowa City bound

We had a lot of good news today at mom's appointment with Dr. Porubcin. First of all, she's up to 102 lbs! It must have been all of the fried chicken last weekend - plus I think her and Aunt Ruth and Aunt Carol have been eating out quite a bit this week as well :)

When Dr. Porubcin walked in I already knew he had good news - he gets so giddy it's hard for him to contain his enthusiasm. Her CA125 level was down to a whopping 4 (considering the fact that it was up over 3000 in April) and he had good results from the CT scan. There were no visible blood clots on her lungs - they all dissolved - and it looked like there weren't as many "implants" as the previous scans indicated. He said there was still some detectable cancer areas but it was significantly reduced. Dr. Porubcin has never seen these kind of results from a chemo treatment before and was very happy that mom took well to the treatments.

The only concern was mom's left arm where a blood clot had formed after her first chemo treatement. Her arm has been quite achy for the last week and she hasn't gotten much relief since the last chemo treatment. So, Dr. Porubcin ordered another doppler scan of that area just to make sure. She went to Hammond Henry this afternoon and had the scan done - and long story short there's NO blood clot there either.

So next week she goes to Iowa City to visit Dr. DeGeest again for a surgery consult. I'm sure she will have to go through the same tests she went through before, and if all indicators are good they will schedule her for surgery.

She will have to stop taking the Lovenox for a couple of days before surgery to reduce the risk of bleeding, but will be able to get right back on it after surgery. Dr. Porubcin would like her to stay on it for awhile, until next April, to reduce the chance of blood clots. She will go see him again about 3 or 4 weeks after surgery.

With this big Dr. visit out of the way, she has a better picture of what will happen in the next month. She's looking forward to having it over with, and I don't blame her. Tomorrow the aunts are taking a Mississippi river cruise on the Celebration Belle, and then Saturday we are going to Kewanee for dinner and a little shopping.

No comments:

Post a Comment