4 Treatments and a CT

It's been a while since I've posted an update! That's because most of cancer treatment, when it's working as intended, is frankly pretty boring... they set you up on a schedule where you show up for chemo treatments every so often (in Cat's case, once a week... in mine, once every two weeks) and then you put up with side effects until the next treatment rolls around. Rinse, repeat, and eventually the oncologist evaluates your progress and maybe you keep doing it or maybe not. So it's been a boring road for the past few weeks with not a lot of news. Not until today!

When we first started treatment, our doctor told me we would do four cycles and then get a CT scan and see what our progress looked like. The CT scan happened Friday. We got to see the text report on Saturday, and we started to get really excited! But I didn't want to share it until we got to talk to the actual doctor. Today (Monday) we get to see him, and he's excited too! The report basically goes through every bit of cancer they initially found, and tells us how much SMALLER it is! The whole goal of chemo treatment is to attack the cancer and reduce the size until either it goes away completely or it is small enough to attack using radiation or surgery. In his office he actually showed us the before-treatment and now versions of the same CT scan side by side, and the tumors are visibly much smaller! The treatment is doing exactly what it's supposed to! Praise God!

On top of that, he had some really exciting news... there is a new chemo drug that was just approved for use less than a week ago. I'll call it "Yabba-dabba-doo" because I can't remember drug names but they all sound like the names of Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters to me. If insurance will pay for the Yabba-dabba-doo, it will replace one of the drugs we're using now, and reportedly has a 37% better effectiveness. This means that what we're already doing is doing amazing things, but we may be able to accelerate even more!

Please understand that we are not relying on only the chemotherapy. Most nights when I lie down to go to sleep, I pray "Thank you, God, that You are my healer." I have a list of healing-related Scriptures on my phone, some of which I've shared here already, and I look at them often. Faith in God is absolutely a part of all of this! But we believe, as I've shared before, that God also created medicine to help the body heal itself, so we take advantage of it all!