New Treatment Plan

We spent most of today at CHOC, Kelly is worn out. We started with Oncology. We have decided that Kelly will start her next round of chemotherapy on November 12. She still has one more neurosurgery procedure next week. (I'll get to that below) She will do 2 weeks of IV chemo,then 2 weeks off. We will be driving up to CHOC 5 days a week for 2 weeks for this treatment, so she can do it outpatient. She will also continue her oral temodar she was taking before, but will have a stronger dose.

She also had her pentamidine IV treatment today. This prevents her from getting sick, but she feels lousy the day she gets it. We usually go right home afterwards so she can sleep. But today we had another appointment with neurosurgery.

We saw Dr. Muhonen first so he could make sure she was doing OK after her surgery. He wants to leave her stitches in one more week. Her incision looks good, but he is being careful because her skin has been radiated and it doesn't always heal as quickly. Her vision is doing much better after this surgery. He then explained to us that at the meeting about Kelly's treatment plan, they thought it would be a good idea for her to have gamma knife radiosurgery. His partner, Dr. Loudon, is trained to do this, so he came in next to talk to us.

He drew pictures and used her MRI scans to show us how he wanted to use the gamma knife (a form of very focused radiation, no real knife involved) to create a boundry around the area where her tumors have been. This will hopefully keep the remaining cancer cells from spreading to other parts of her brain. We felt better after his explanation. She will have it done at either Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach or Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla. They will let me know when they get it scheduled for sometime next week.

Dr. Loudon could see Kelly was a little shaky after all of this, so he made her feel better by doing some really cool magic tricks for her. I think she feels pretty comfortable with him now! She also had to go downstairs and have some X-rays taken to get ready for next week. I have those now and will give them to Dr. Loudon when he does the Gamma Knife Procedure.

Here is a link that explains the gamma knife:
www.floridabraintumors.com/leksell.html