Adrienne's fourth chemo yesterday was uneventful. She gets 50 mg of Benadryl as a premed to avoid the hives so now she sleeps through the whole thing. Her many visitors (Erika, Mary, Debora, Rich) got to talk and watch her sleep. Still, she enjoys the company.
Before chemo, we met with the BMT doctor. Erika came along to see if she could learn anything new about DLIs and her own disease. The BMT doctor is not convinced that DLIs will help Adrienne's disease, and they could make her quite sick with a flare of graft-vs-host disease (GVHD). She wants to talk with the BMT doctors at Stanford and the doctor up in Seattle before committing. Our feeling is that it's worth trying, provided it doesn't make her too sick. The doctor I spoke to in Seattle felt that a small dose of DLI would mean little side effects and might extend her remission up to two years. Stay tuned.
Adrienne has a PET/CT scan next week, and we believe that it will show that she's in remission again. We're looking into a host of possible treatments from staying on the current chemo for an extended period of time, getting radiation to the area of recurrence, and participating in some clinical trials. The trial that we are most interested in uses a drug called Velcade given with her chemo. That trial will be available at Stanford in the next few weeks.
We found out over the weekend that Adrienne was admitted to UC San Diego. We won't know anything else until March 31 when UC Berkeley, Tufts, and Brown post their acceptances. Claremont McKenna, Adrienne's first choice, sends acceptances the old fashioned way on April 1.
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Adrienne was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Disease in 1996 at age 9. She had multiple relapses, two bone marrow transplants, and a range of chemos and radiation therapies, and passed away on October 1, 2009. We are heartbroken.
Out with the Girls
About Adrienne
- Adrienne
- Adrienne was very much like others with Hodgkin's Lymphoma, the most common cancer in teens and young adults. What was unusual is that she had it for more than half her life and ultimately, it took her life. Hodgkin's is curable for about 80% people, but Adrienne was one of the 20% for whom a cure was elusive. She considered herself lucky since treatments had been there for her with each relapse but she ran out of treatment options and her body just couldn’t take any more. As she said, "Though I’ve now had cancer for most of my life, I no longer plan my life around it; instead, I try to plan cancer around my life." We hope you can take inspiration from her and how she lived her life.
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