Friday was the first day Jill missed a Doctors appointment. She was only able to drive the car about 15 miles befour the pain in her leg from the tumor infecting her Lymph node and wrapping around her aorta. The picture is from her first treatment of the immunotherapy drug Keytruda. She was moved to the drug on January 25 after she had previously spent three months on second line chemo therapy was found to nor be having any results. Last year her cancer was profiled as being positive for the bio marker Programmed death-ligand 1 or PD-L1. This opened up the possibility that Keytruda would be effective against fighting her tumor with the possibility of even putting her into remission.
When she began the treatments she was still working 15 – 20 hours a week but in little more than a month she couldn’t work more than an hour a day with the standing on her leg not only causing it to swell to over twice her size, but also causing her unbearable pain that was only elevated with handfuls of her Hydromorphone, Ibuprofen, Benadryl cocktail. With a trip to the emergency room for extreme dehydration and low levels of magnesium, after the iv and the mix that the doctors of Bangor’s hospital gave her, I was finally able to see a semblance of peace on her face that had been absent for well over the last month.
The hunt has now begun as we look over the options that are available in the many possible clinical trials, each one with a different promise of hope, but like looking at Disneyland land vacations; each one is also is just as unattainable as the next. With address in every part of the country and the only similarity for each of these trials is their lack of being in New England or anywhere within possible driving distance.
With each email that I send I know even if Jill is accepted that the inevitable hard questions will come; where do you live, how will we be able to make it to each appointment, what kind of commitment can you make.
In the end I will tell them all what they need to hear to get us in the door and grab hold of my wife an take the leap with prayer and faith that we will grow wings on the way down and we can find a cure to her cancer.
Please Pray and Share