Treatment Begins!

My apologies for the delay in a post today. There really wasn’t a whole lot of change until late this afternoon when the nurse came by and said the radiology team had come up with a plan and were ready to start Mike’s radiation. Yahoo! That was a really quick turn around on coming up with a plan. When we went down for his simulation yesterday, the nurses told me it’s pretty complicated to come up with a treatment plan. From my understanding they put the MRI and CT scans on top of each other and come up with a plan for treatment. It usually takes a while to do because they have to figure out where they are going to go in with the radiation beams so that they don’t cause any other harm such as damage to his vision. We are very fortunate that they jumped on this and got the plan together so quickly. Since the radiation started today, Mike began the chemotherapy as well. The two are started on the same day because they work better together than they do individually. The pharmacy compounded the Temodar, and Mike received it through his feeding tube. Yes, that would be the feeding tube and not the I.V. like some ridiculous people might think. Can you imagine someone even thinking such a silly thing? I haven’t received the tumor measurement from the MRI yet. They didn’t do a typical MRI yesterday; it is what is known as a “mapping” one to come up with the treatment plan. By the time we got down to radiation today, the doctor had already left, so I was unable to find out the size. Hopefully, I’ll know something tomorrow.

After we returned from the radiation treatment this afternoon, the speech therapist came for the swallow study, so it ended up being a rather productive day after all. The speech therapist had Mike try some of the yummy hospital ice, drinking water, and eating applesauce. He did well with all of those, so tomorrow he will have part two of the study where they will take him down to x-ray to watch him swallow barium. This will let the doctors know if anything is getting stuck in Mike’s esophagus or if all is going down well. I think the plan is to remove the feeding tube from his nose to do the test then if they feel like he still needs some assistance with his eating, they’ll put a peg in his stomach.

Thank you all again for your many, many prayers. Mike and I (and I am sure all of you) are well aware that the only reason Mike is still with us is because of all of your prayers. Please continue to pray. While Mike is showing improvements from day to day, we are still far from being out of the woods.