Chemo Treatment #3

Our regular, biweekly hangout. Their "therapy dog" is Augie.
I'll need to try to get a picture of him at our next visit.

After getting Dan off to Italy on Tuesday, Ed had his 3rd chemo treatment on Wednesday. The report from Dr. Bowers is that things are looking good. His blood tests are looking good (numbers are moving in the right direction) and it appears the liver has continued to shrink. He's quite happy with Ed's response to the treatment. He considered doing another CT scan but both him and Ed agreed they could wait a couple more sessions (not me...I want to look NOW...but I figured I'd give Ed this decision to make!).

They used Ed's port for the treatment and the nurse (the wonderful Shayne) said the port area looked very good considering he just had it done last week. Kudos to Dr. O'Brien on doing such a good job!


There were two women receiving their first treatments while we were there and Dr. Bowers recommended they both get the port. So here was Ed, one week after getting his port, sharing info about the surgery and showing his port to them. We laughed about how he is already the veteran and it was only his 3rd visit! Of course as I type this I realize how sad it really is how quickly new cancer patients arrive and Ed is no longer the newbie.

The treatment was uneventful. Ed read his paper, I did work on my laptop. So far still no serious side effects but I'm watching and waiting carefully. Dr. Bowers keeps saying he'll be fine; others have said it's worse after the second or third treatment. Time will tell.

Minor side effects are dry skin--partly from the dry air/winter, but partly due to the chemo; thinning hair; and some slight swelling in his legs. He hasn't had any swelling the last couple weeks so I attribute this to the fact that he worked all day today and probably was on his feet longer than he should have been. But these are all minor things that we can deal with.

On another note, we did hear from Dan (a quick email) to let us know he arrived in Italy and so did his luggage. They've got him busy right now with orientation so he really didn't have much time to write yet but he's hoping to share pics in the next few days.

And for all of you who keep asking how you can help, be careful...I might ask you to try to figure out all the medicine bills and insurance claims! It is crazy and I'm an organized, detailed person. But trying to make sense of the bills and tie them up to claims, etc., is nuts. This is what I tried to do after work tonight.

So thankfully not too much report. Below are some pictures that Ed allowed me to take.

You can see the port here.

IV inserted into the port.

All "wired" up.

In his "usual" chair in the infusion suite.
Of course, he's usually reclined, sitting back with his feet up.