Loose Strife

When we decided to go on our big Hawaii, California, Virginia trip soon after Laura’s CSF mets diagnosis and brain surgery it seemed like a big risk. But Laura’s remission was perfectly timed and we had a great trip.
When Laura got out of the hospital and went to see her neuro-oncologist two weeks ago it seemed like her health was on the decline. We heard an honest and sobering assessment and left with a renewed sense that Laura needed to “get her things in order” and make sure that she got to travel to see the rest of her family before she wasn’t able to. At first we were planning to leave as soon as possible, but we decided to wait. That delay seemed risky at first since we worried that her mobility might get even worse in the coming weeks. Instead, she has responded to radiation to her spine and walks better every day. She carries a cane when she goes out and still is slow on stairs, but otherwise the cane sits alone!
So Laura is doing very well and it looks like she is in great shape to travel tomorrow. She and I went to Northampton today for appointments and then strolled around Main Street for a little while. We picked up an 8×10 print of our wedding photo. After 14 years we finally would have something to hang on the wall! But we got the wrong negative printed. I look like a deer caught in the headlights, but Laura looks terrific! One of these days we’ll get it done and done right. Anyway, we bought some ice cream at Harrell’s. We did some window shopping and took our picture in a photo booth.
(For all you photo addicts, here’s the “wrong” one (close-up), the “right” one, and another wedding photo, just for fun. I joked to Laura that we should photoshop the first and second together.)

Anyway, back to the present. Laura had a neck MRI yesterday. We met with her oncologist this morning and she told us that the MRI showed no nerve problems to explain Laura’s numb hand. Her legs are a little numb, too. We were told that it might be the CSF mets, but Laura is doing so well, relatively speaking, that the oncologist didn’t want “to sweat the small stuff.” And if it is CSF mets, which seems likely to me, then she would be getting the same treatment anyway, according to her onc. So we’re not too worked up about it, yet, although I have a call in to her neuro-oncologist to give him an update and make sure that he doesn’t have a different opinion.
Laura received some more chemo infusions today — Avastin and also a drug called Zometa, which she receives regularly for her bone mets. (You might have seen Zometa mentioned in the news in the last few days because of some new hopeful findings for its use in early stage breast cancer. Those latest results don’t apply to Laura. But even so, the results were actually statistically insignificant due to the small sample size. Some day I’ll write more on how utterly complicated and difficult the drug development process is and how hard it is to translate the glacial pace of research into understandable news for non-scientists. It’s a mess.)
Laura also finally got around to giving blood for a genetic screen that detects DNA mutations associated with susceptibility to breast cancer. It doesn’t affect her treatment, but is important information for our daughters, Laura’s sisters, and her mom. As part of the paperwork, the nurse asked for any history of cancer in Laura’s family. I opened my notebook. “I’ve got it all written down,” I said. I started to list the 4 aunts and her mom, all who had early stage (so-called “in situ”) breast cancer. I didn’t even get to the other cancers in the family. “Stop. That’s enough,” the nurse says. “They only gave me three lines.”
My long page of data seems compelling, but almost all of the other cases in the family occurred at older ages, and I’ve read that such occurrences increase Laura’s statistical chance of having breast cancer mutations by only about a percentage point or two. So we sort of expect her to test positive because she’s young and there’s a lot of cancer in the family, but we won’t be too surprised if she tests negative. Cancer is complicated. Really complicated. After all, I wouldn’t be writing such an upbeat post tonight if statistics were personal.