She went to the doctor today. Her counts aren't great, but they were good enough for her to still be at home. They're working on getting a CT scheduled to see if the treatments are working. They couldn't get a PET passed through insurance. Apparently if you have lung cancer you can get a scan every 3 months, but if you have cancer that's metastasized to the lungs, it's only every 9 months. I guess the doctor fought hard, but it was impossible to convince the money grubbers that it was necessary to allow a PET scan more often than every 9 months in a case where the prognosis survival (without a working treatment which is what the PET tests for) was less than 9 months...
Anyway, the plan for the next week is to keep trucking as we are. She'll meet with the doctor again next week. We may or may not have the CT before then to make some decisions regarding treatment, but right now we have no treatment planned while she's still fighting this blood infection (she left the hospital on Thursday with Orders for 25 days of the IV antibiotics, so we're already into mid-January). It's not our favorite place waiting on doctors and tests and medicines, but that's where we are.
Thank you all for the continued thoughts and prayers. Obviously we're still trying to protect her from anyone who's ill as her counts are down, but we did get her phone fixed (there was a slight accident on Christmas Eve involving a four year old, a glass of tea and Jo's phone) so she's receiving calls and texts again, though not always at the moment they're made :)
I'll leave you with some pics. I'm sure many of you have seen some of them before, but they still make me smile :)
Kara on Left, Johnna on Right
Thanks for this blog to keep us all updated. Makes it easier on your family so you don't have to field individual calls in the hundreds and rehash the same thing.
ReplyDeleteThanks, too, for the photos. I've seen most if not all of them but they still make me smile in return to those two girls' smiles!
love you you, Johnna, your dad, your mom and families!!