Insert Yell of Joy here!

From my SIL, Debbie:

Hi Friends and Family. Hope you're having a great night! So far, we have had a great week (almost normal!) and I'm hoping it will continue. Taylor had her doctor's appointment to go over the results of her PET and CT scans (if you haven't read my journal entry about that day you should. It was an eye-opener!) Her doctor informed us that the tumors (aka affected lymph nodes) have shrunk significantly and 90% of them appear to have died off (which is a good thing.) The remaining 10% are either dying off or have died and just haven't shrunk yet. This officially puts her into the category known as "early remission" which means that she is in the very beginning stages of remission. To put it in plain terms, they have killed off the existing cancer nodes and are now going to turn their attention to medicating the rest of her system to ensure that the remaining nodes and other organs are protected and that any pre-cancer cells that are lurking elsewhere are found and eliminated. We are looking at about 2 years of decreasingly frequent chemotherapy to accomplish this.

While her next phase of treatment seems to be less proactive on the surface, it is actually more intense drug-wise, at least in the clinic. She will be getting a mixture of five chemotherapy drugs at once now (as opposed to two or three) and she will have to have spinal injections which means twilight sedation once a week for the next five weeks. In addition, we will have to do subcutaneous injections at home for three of the seven days per week. The flip side is that she will have to take two to three medications daily by mouth instead of the nine or ten that she is taking now (depending on the days.) But the chemo is WORKING which is the best news in the world that we could get.



Praising God here! Please keep praying!