Not a Pretty Picture

It makes me sick writing this, but she asked me to...

Becca continues to fight gamely, but she is clearly enveloped in pain, nausea and her body is depleted, weak and frail. The tumor in her abdomen swells while the rest of her body shrinks. Her hemoglobin count was 8.1 today, so she’s back in the cancer center for a transfusion on Saturday.

Not a lot of options, but they pretty much boil down to trying another treatment or getting some sort of hospice or palliative care. Quality of life versus quantity (of days). Inside I know she’s struggling with that. So are we. Outside, she fights on doggedly, and her fighting spirit told her to go with the treatment today. She’ll be starting Temador in a couple days, a chemo prescribed more often for brain tumors that is taken orally and which is very well tolerated by most people, meaning it doesn’t generally effect blood counts or cause nausea. Keeping those pills down may be another story. With Temador Becca could get more stability to keep the disease from growing, but she’s unlikely to see shrinkage. So best case, it’s a life extender that is not a huge risk. It will be six weeks before she even gets a scan. In the meantime, Xrays will suffice to see if there’s blockage.

If the tumor continues to expand or spread, the worst-case scenario would be a bowel obstruction. Or the tumor could impinge on something else in the area, like a kidney. While she could not survive a major operation, which would be a last resort, smaller procedures might be possible that involve different ways to drain the area, such as a nasal tube, a colostomy, a tube in through abdomen in other parts of stomach.

How much time does she have? No one knows. No one wants to ask.