Had first day of 3rd chemo

Was another long day. We left at 5:15 a.m. for 6:30 lab, 7:30 Dr's appointment and then 9:00a.m. infusion chair. Of course it takes an hour after you are in the chair to get any medications started. We got home about 6:00 p.m. My blood counts remain good, and so do the liver enzymes . The best news though is that the CA 125 dropped from 2560 to 969. That means that the Cisplatin/Taxol are still working for me. That is a very good thing. All of your prayers are working. Thank you so much.

I will need to continue the daily blood thinner shots as long as I am on Chemo. The cancer is causing the clots, but they do not know why. I may be able to go on the pills after I finish chemo, but Coumadin does not always prevent clots in people with cancer. And my cancer will not really be gone. So that will be a decision to be made later.

The current treatment of chemo every 3 weeks will continue until the cancer marker stabilizes and then I will get a chemo break. Or if the cancer marker goes up I will need different chemo drugs. Since we are returning to IL the first part of April, I asked this doctor which drugs he would recommend. He said probably Avastin, possibly taxotern, but sine I was already on Taxol he was not sure if that would work, and Cytoxan(a pill). Linda was on cytoxan for a while. He said that Doxil had finally gotten approval for uterine cancer, but there is a shortage now and no new people can go on Doxil, only those that were previously gotten the drug. He thought the shortage would be over in 6 months, so maybe that could be a possibility. He said Adriamycin would be the alternative, but has many side effects. I hope we do not have to cross that bridge for awhile.

I have my fourth chemo set up in IL for April 12, 13. I hope I can be done with chemo by June and enjoy the rest of the summer. Of course no one has told me this.....it is only my hope.

The second round of chemo was much better than the first with much less nausea. I used compazine rather than Zofran. I did have a cough and used 3 boxes of kleenex , but those symptoms are much better now. Don't know if my tiredness was from the chemo or the cough but I hope that is better this time around. Food did not any taste for two weeks, but no taste is better than metallic taste. So it will be interesting to see what happens this time around.

I asked about my samples being saved from my original surgery 1/09, and the doctor said he was not sure, he would have to check. I thought all the tumors and lymph nodes would be saved for studies. But he said since I have had several rounds of chemo done the cancer is different from what it was then, so doing tests on them would probably not be beneficial. He did not seem to think that these testing on tumors was really reliable. He said you could test the same tumor in six different places and get 6 different results on which drugs would best. He kept saying there are companies that do these testing, but did not think they were always reliable.

I also asked about follow-up on my blood clots, and he said I did not need any further scans unless I had some problems. He said further testing is not routinely done. He said the blood thinner shots work for some people, but not always. Not really what I wanted to hear. The thought of having a stroke really does scare me. I have put my husband through so much, and he has been a great support. But I sure would not want to burden him with that. My husband is not a morning person, so to get up at 4:30 shows me how much he loves me.

We got tomorrow for day 2 which will be a little shorter day since we do not have to be there until 8:30. Thanks for all the thoughts and prayers, they are much appreciate. In peace and caring.