2005-2006

Dr. Hwu and his staff were incredible. And they loved her and cared for her. Her attitude was, well, if you knew my mom, you can guess what her attitude was. She was Amazing. And she made so many friends with the nurses in the ICU and on the regular recovery floor as well. They even chose to put her on the cover of one of MDA’s research magazines! She had a blast with that and thought it was hilarious! The picture is of her and Dr. Hwu looking at her scans on a computer screen. They were both smiling in the picture and, during the shoot, were making all kinds of jokes about how if anyone could make out what was on the scans, they’d wonder why in the world they were smiling at them!!! The scans they were using were of when she first came to MDA, and they weren’t pretty!! But the IL-2 was successful in removing all but the most stubborn of her tumors, there were two left; the big one and a smaller one. But her new scans showed that they were all dying from the inside out, and even though she wasn’t receiving anymore IL-2, they would continue to do so. She was invited to be a guest of honor at the opening of the Red McCombs Research Center at MDA.

She was very sad to leave Dr. Hwu’s care, but he was only her IL-2 doctor and she had to go back to the GU clinic. Dr. Tannir was her doctor there. They decided that she would go on a drug called Avastin. It had very low side effects and very little risk, but had proven to be effective. She went down to MDA every two weeks for her 90-minute infusion. It was not technically “chemo” so she did not lose her hair, but she did gain weight and was tired a lot. She had a picc line placed to receive this drug. She began this in August of 2005 and took it for over a year, during which Nathan was gone quite a bit with military training. We enjoyed that she did not have side effects that made her overly sick and we spent a lot of time playing and traveling to the beach, between her every two week visits to MDA and her regular scans… she hated those scans. Her condition was “stable”. Every time we went to MDA they said she was “stable”, which meant, it isn’t growing, but it isn’t going away either. Dr. Tannir said that they were “buying her time”.