New update
We are home from Houston. The news was not great. The “new” area was a tumor, mostly anyway. Loretta will be starting on a new infusion chemo, Avastin. She will do a 90 minute infusion every 3 weeks, and follow up with MRI’s in Houston every 6 weeks. Avastin works by attacking the blood vessels feeding tumor, and if it works, they say it works “astoundingly well”. There is a 50/50 chance on it working on a given individual. The drug has been used to fight other types of cancers, but has just been approved by the FDA for brain tumors in the last 2 months. That will help with getting it cleared on insurance, at least. The good thing about it, there are no significant side effects. The Temodar that she was taking really knocked her down for the 5 days out of every month she was on it. Poor baby could hardly get out of bed. :( Since it works on blood vessels, there are issues with clotting and bleeding, but Loretta is a good candidate since she has never had issues with clotting / not clotting.
We are praying for a wonderful outcome, and that she responds very well to this new treatment. The strange thing is, the other tumor site is still completely clean, while the new one started.
Most of our trips to Houston have been “non-eventful” as far as the travel is concerned, but this trip, we were not so lucky. 45 min from out Hotel off of South 610, the car in front of us hit something hard and white in the road…best guess is it was a PVC “L” joint that had fallen off of a work truck, about a foot long, elbow-style. When it came out from under the car in front of us, it was jumping around like a jumping bean. I tried to avoid it, but we were doing about 70, it hit our right front tire which threw it up under the undercarriage, BAM. Huge impact.
I watched in the rearview mirror to see if the next car was going to hit it, and about 10 seconds later, it comes tumbling out of the sky. I think it got about 50-60 ft of air! Well, I had a bad feeling after that impact, and sure enough, about 5 min later, our AC went completely hot. We were heading into 4:45PM rush hour traffic, temperature was in the high 90’s. Not good. Loretta was peaked when we got to the Hotel, but we did manage to get the Van fixed and AC restored (I won’t mention the price tag; I’m trying to forget…). The trip back was, thankfully, much easier and less eventful.
Thank you for all the prayers and support. God is about our only comfort.