December 27th, 2016
I hope you all had a Merry Christmas. We had a great time with all of 
our families here at one time or another. Santa was good to us all. Tammy has been recovering well and has been in good spirits. We received the go ahead to restart the trial last week and made some fast arrangements to get here yesterday for testing, doctor visit, and treatment today.
She had her CT scans this morning and we got the results back. There are a couple of angry burgers that are causing some issues. The biggest issue is that one is growing next to a rib and causing some pain. On the CT it looked like maybe there could be a small fracture in the rib. There is nothing right now that they can do about it except try to manage the pain. The doctor said that sometimes with immunotherapy you can actually get some growth and then things will actually start shrinking. That is what we are hoping for. We all decided to give the trial one month and retest and then go on from there. All of us are reaching out to all the doctors involved with Tammy ( here, home, MD Anderson, and anywhere else) to look for what the next option might be. She still has one drug on the standard of care that she can go to which is Stivarga. She will start radiation on her head on the ninth of January so this is a good time to keep trying the trial because she will have to have a wash out period after radiation anyway. She will have five radiation treatments and will be done. it will take about three weeks to get them all in.
January 2nd, 2017
At the end of last week we got a call from MD Anderson and they could get us in today to see her oncolo
gist here. We booked some quick flights on Friday and booked it down here for a quick trip. Our flights were out of Kansas city and on the way there a nice officer stopped us to remind us that our tags were over due. For some reason it has slipped our minds. We continued on and made it here for her appointment today. Here doctor here looked everything over and agrees that she should stay on the trial a little longer and see if it will work. As of right now it is the best option. If that doesn’t work then we will start looking at some radiation to the bigger spots to see if we can knock them down a little bit.
Tammy is looking at this as “bumps” in the road. She is feeling really good except for the pain in her shoulder which hopefully the stuff they gave her will take care of. She is one strong woman! For me it is another step in the miracle, but it still makes me
angry and impatient.
We wish you all a great new year and all of the best in 2017.