Longest Thursday Ever

This is going to be a quick blog update because it has been a really long and emotionally draining two days for all of us. Yesterday we spent all day at the hospital. First, Jason got a brain MRI, than blood work and chest x-rays, and finally a CT scan of the majority of Jason's torso. We didn't get home until 9:30 last night.

This morning we had an appt. with an Opthamologist at MD Anderson. I was impressed with their high tech equipment but not with their punctuality. Our appointment was at 9:30 and we didn't get out of there until 2:30. Most of the time was spent in the waiting room. They confirmed that Jason does have a large melanoma in the back of his left eye. He has lost most of the vision in that eye. His right eye is fine. The Opthamologist we saw today was not a melanoma specialist, so they ran all the tests today, but we have to go back tomorrow at 7:30 in the morning to see a specialist and find out the odds of getting the tumor to shrink using radiation and possibly getting more of his eyesight back.

Next, we had an appt. with Dr. Kim, Jason's oncologist. The news was not good. Jason's brain is still clear (thankfully), but the disease has progressed in the rest of his body. The tumors have grown in size in his liver and lungs, and he has developed new lesions subcutaneously and in his spleen. Also his LDH levels were quite high which means his body is being stressed by the tumor load. So this means that the IL2 treatment has not worked. I also debated with the doctor about whether Jason's melanoma was ocular (originating from his eye) or cutaneous (originating from the skin). He won me over with his argument for thinking it is cutaneous. Even though it is very rare for melanoma to go from the skin to the eye, he has seen it happen before. Also, he hasn't seen ocular melanoma metastasize subcutaneously, and I had to agree with him about that from the research that I have done. And statistically, cutaneous melanoma is much more common than ocular. The treatments for these 2 types of melanoma are quite different, so I wanted to be reasonably sure we were choosing the correct treatment to try next.

The doctor convinced us that we need to be much more aggressive. Jason is going to start biochemotherapy on Monday. This is a combination of IL2, Interpheron alpha, and 3 kinds of chemo drugs. I will elaborate more on this therapy later...for now just say it will be no picnic for Jason. We are still waiting to hear about Jason's T-cells from the TIL study. If we can get tumor shrinkage from biochemotherapy, than Jason will hopefully be strong enough to handle IL2 therapy again, and it can be combined with his cloned T cells if they have grown successfully.

Finally, we found out that Jason has multiple blood clots, which is the reason why he has been in tremendous pain with swollen legs and a swollen right arm, and he hasn't been able to walk for the past week. I will be giving him injections twice a day with a blood clotting medication for the next 30 days. Hopefully he will still love me just as much after I stick a needle in him twice a day. The best part is that each injection cost $100 and our insurance company only wants to pay for 10 of them, and we need 60. You gotta love medical insurance! They are really good about not paying for medications that cancer patients need to survive. I won't even get into that rant right now.

On a brighter note, after our early morning appt. tomorrow, we get a couple days of rest. We are all trying to stay positive and we know that Jason is strong and will make it through the next round of treatments. We had a wonderful time in San Diego. It was great to be home and it was great to see everyone. I will post some pictures from the SD trip sometime this weekend when I have more energy. For now, we want to send everyone our love and please keep Jason in your thoughts/prayers. He is tired and needs a few days of recuperation, but he seems to be taking things well enough.