Thursday, February 17, 2005
2/7/05
Oh, god I hate to write this, but Jacob's tumor has come back. It happened really fast. A week ago last Wednesday when I was dropping him off at school I thought I saw something funny in his gaze, and by the time I picked him up it was obvious that he couldn't look up. We took him in the next morning and they confirmed it.
He finished five days of chemo Saturday, and they sprung us from the hospital around two thirty. Jacob is already much better, just being out of that environment. It was pretty awful. He came down with a virus, fever and cough just as we were being admitted on Tuesday so he had the triple whammy of the tumor itself, the virus and the chemo. Under the circumstances he tolerated the new, more powerful, drugs well, but it was hard to see him so weak.
His back is hurting badly for some reason, so I'm taking him back to the clinic today to see what is going on, but he can walk and talk, which is an improvement over last week. Now if he could just eat. He has two weeks to recover before the next one, and we hope he'll start back to school an hour or two a day sometime later in the week.
The good news is, the tests showed that the tumor hasn't spread anywhere new in his body. The bad news is the tumor in the pineal area is a lot bigger than it was before, and presumably more aggressive, so we just have to see how he does with these new drugs. Just now, he told us that his double vision is getting better and he can see without the eye-patch he's been wearing. That's really big news; almost certainly means the tumor is shrinking. The plan is now that he'll probably have four to six rounds of chemo and then an autologous stem cell rescue (aka bone marrow transplant.)
He finished five days of chemo Saturday, and they sprung us from the hospital around two thirty. Jacob is already much better, just being out of that environment. It was pretty awful. He came down with a virus, fever and cough just as we were being admitted on Tuesday so he had the triple whammy of the tumor itself, the virus and the chemo. Under the circumstances he tolerated the new, more powerful, drugs well, but it was hard to see him so weak.
His back is hurting badly for some reason, so I'm taking him back to the clinic today to see what is going on, but he can walk and talk, which is an improvement over last week. Now if he could just eat. He has two weeks to recover before the next one, and we hope he'll start back to school an hour or two a day sometime later in the week.
The good news is, the tests showed that the tumor hasn't spread anywhere new in his body. The bad news is the tumor in the pineal area is a lot bigger than it was before, and presumably more aggressive, so we just have to see how he does with these new drugs. Just now, he told us that his double vision is getting better and he can see without the eye-patch he's been wearing. That's really big news; almost certainly means the tumor is shrinking. The plan is now that he'll probably have four to six rounds of chemo and then an autologous stem cell rescue (aka bone marrow transplant.)
# posted by Jacob's Dad @ 12:34 PM 
