Nervous Days

Adrienne saw the doctor this afternoon. We've been worried about doing another clinical trial but he still thinks we have time to try as long as they monitor her disease very closely. The clinical trial that she's dropping out of has seen two responses in Hodgkin's Disease, but unfortunately Adrienne wasn't one of those. Right now, the itching from the disease is annoying. She scratched her foot so hard the other day that she made a nice bruise. They prescribed a new drug for the itching, which helps a lot but it also makes her very sleepy. So now Adrienne will get ready for the ABT-263 trial with more tests over the next two weeks. Here's some information about the drug. http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/06-26-2007/0004615505&EDATE==

Today was Adrienne's first day of classes. She had two: a religious studies class (for humanities GE credit) and a class on personality (for a psychology elective). So far, so good. She's also taking Intro to Film Studies and Finance/Accounting plus one additional class that she's hoping to get into. She won't need to work this semester so that should help make her schedule manageable, especially with her treatment. There's a shuttle bus from the campus to the medical center or she can take a short subway ride so that's quite convenient.

We're very nervous right now with the faster progression. The doctor promises to watch her very closely and change course quickly if needed. She isn't having symptoms from the cancer in her lung (such as pain, coughing, shortness of breath) so she's supposed to pay very close attention to that. She also isn't having B symptoms (fevers, night sweats, weight loss). If anything changes, they promise to make a change in her treatment. So we just watch and wait. I told the doctor today very directly that we don't want to make a short term decision that could compromise her health later and he acknowledged that.