MsC1210
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Posts posted by MsC1210
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Hello Anya and welcome
Your post touched my heart as I was in a very, very similar situation just over 3 yrs ago. I know what you are going through and I am so glad you found this site now!
Please know we are here for you and we will do our best to help you understand things and answer all your questions and offer you our best advice. There are a lot of very, very good people on here and they are always willing to help in any way they can.
One thing I would like to say now is to take a notebook or small tape recorder with you to all of the appointments and write everything down. Keep track of tests, results, treatments, dr visits, EVERYTHING. Get copies of all the test results so you have everything in one place when/if you need a 2nd opinion (We all highly recommend 2nd opinions and even 3rd or 4th!!!)
Keep the hope and let us know how we can be of help
Many hugs and prayers to you and your friend,
Christine
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Thank you, all, for your kind words and understanding. It really amazes me at times how the little things can just bring it ALL back, ya know?
I haven't been on this site much lately, just been working on my own projects and living life I guess.
Tonight marks another milestone that Brad would have LOVED.. Tonight will be the first LIVE hockey game for my 10 yr old son. It will be an adventure for sure and I am so excited about it. I know Brad would have been, too and I am sure he will be "there"....
Although I am not as active here as I used to be, I still read and I still continue to hold all of you in my thoughts and prayers.
Many hugs and thanks
Chris
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I am sorry to hear about Marcia. Please know my thoughts and prayers are with the family at this time.
Warmly
Christine
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((((Patti))))
I already talked to you but wanted to chime in here and say CONGRATS!!!!!
Now keep up this good work and we will be celebrating together in June!
Love and Hugs!!!
Chris
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I am so very sorry to read this. Like Sue, I had learned of Carole's passing last evening from another member but just was unable to find the words.
I am grateful for having been able to "meet" Carole and have learned so much from her wisdom, her unselfishness in sharing her journey and mostly just from being the wonderful human being that she was.
Thank you for letting us know and my sincere condolences to her friends and family.
Carole, you are missed my friend.....
Love and Hugs
Christine
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I posted this in new treatments/clinical trials as well but thought it was worthy of being here, at least for a while.
Is my chemo working? Scans may give faster answer
By MALCOLM RITTER
,
AP
NEW YORK -When Mike Stevens learned his lungs were riddled with cancer, it took only a week to start chemotherapy — but six weeks to find out if it was doing any good. "You're going through all this suffering and stuff and you want to know, am I going to survive? Is this stuff working?" said Stevens, 48, of La Jolla, Calif. "Your whole life is in sort of a limbo."
Doctors typically must wait weeks or months to see if a treatment is shrinking tumors or at least halting their growth. But researchers are exploring a new use for medical imaging that could shorten the stay in purgatory, possibly revealing within a few days whether chemo is working.
That speed could save both lives and money. It would allow doctors to switch more quickly from an ineffective drug to a different one, and save health care dollars by waving doctors off expensive but futile treatments.
The same approach may also prove useful for monitoring radiation therapy.
This experimental imaging relies on a familiar hospital workhorse: PET scans, typically used for things like detecting cancer or revealing the effects of a heart attack. Unlike CT scans or MRIs, PET scans can show a tumor's internal activity, not just its size.
When used to assess the effects of cancer treatment, it can reveal inside information about what the therapy is doing to a tumor even when there's no outward sign.
To do a PET scan, doctors inject a patient with a radioactive substance that shows up on the scan in places where certain processes are happening — like hungry cancer cells gobbling up a lot of blood sugar. Think of it as looking around your neighborhood late at night for light in bedroom windows to see who is still awake.
Many cancer patients get PET scans now to assess their disease before treatment, or to spot recurrences later on. But except for lymphoma, PET scans aren't routinely used to get a quicker answer on how cancers are responding to therapy.
The new research tests both standard PET scans and a newer approach that involves injecting a different tracer substance.
The standard scan, which looks for blood sugar usage, has gotten good results in tests with a variety of tumors including breast, prostate, colorectal and esophageal cancers, said Dr. Steven Larson of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
"I think it's going to be extremely valuable for most tumors where there are effective treatments," he said. Some experiments have revealed chemo's effects within 10 days to two weeks.
As a practical matter, the goal of researchers is to convince federal regulators to cover the procedure under Medicare and Medicaid, which would open the door to routine use. That might take two or three years, he said.
Farther out on the research horizon is a PET scan that uses injections of a different radioactive material and has revealed chemotherapy's impact even faster. Larson figures it will be especially useful for assessing newer drugs that aim to stop a patient's cancer from growing rather than killing the tumor.
This scan is called FLT PET, after radioactive fluorothymidine. These scans show whether cancer cells are dividing. Uncontrolled division is a hallmark of active cancer, and stopping that division should be an early effect of successful chemotherapy.
"Our hope ... is you might be able to give a single dose of a chemotherapy agent and within a day or two figure out whether the tumor is going to respond," says Dr. Michael Graham of the University of Iowa.
If the tumor doesn't respond, doctors would "go on to Plan B," he said. "This is really ... giving us the ability to tailor the therapy to the disease."
Research into FLT PET is still in the early stages. Graham said there are maybe a dozen published human studies so far, most involving too few patients to draw a firm conclusion.
One report that impressed him involved 28 patients in Korea who were treated for advanced lung cancer — just like Stevens, who had to wait six weeks to learn whether it was working. The researchers reported that just one week after treatment began, they could tell with 93 percent certainty which patients would eventually respond to the drug and which would not.
In a much smaller study at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, seven patients with acute myeloid leukemia were scanned at various times during a week of aggressive chemotherapy. Normally, doctors wait a month after chemo is stopped to see if it worked. But the FLT PET scans offered an answer as soon as a day after treatment started.
"It's always hard to get too excited about a study that just involves seven people," said Dr. Mark Juckett, one of the authors. But "in these few patients, it looked like we could predict those who were going to respond well to chemotherapy and those who weren't."
Other preliminary studies suggest the new PET technology might be useful in gauging treatment for breast and brain cancers as well as lymphoma.
Graham figures there's a good chance FLT PET scans will become routine for assessing therapy in the next 10 years.
"It's a terrible waste of money to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on these patients when it doesn't do any good," he said.
Graham, president-elect of the Society of Nuclear Medicine, has been involved in discussions between the society and drug companies about incorporating FLT PET in their studies of experimental cancer drugs.
The hope is that, over time, FLT PET would prove reliable for giving a faster answer on whether an experimental treatment is working. That would save companies a lot of money, because they could spot ineffective drugs more quickly and not waste further research on them. And the drug company research would produce data to help persuade federal regulators to approve FLT PET for use in tracking therapy.
Dr. Samuel C. Blackman of pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. said he couldn't comment on the specifics of talks with the nuclear medicine group, but he said, "We're definitely enthusiastic about FLT PET" for cancer drug research.
Mike Stevens, the lung cancer patient, has seen his disease held generally stable by continuing chemotherapy since 2005. And along with the scientists, he also likes the idea of an earlier end to the limbo of not knowing whether a new treatment is working.
"It's like having a rope tied around you and you're leaning over a canyon at about a 45-degree angle, and you don't know if someone is going to pull you back in, or let go of it," he said. "If you get that encouragement earlier on that you're doing well ... you've got something to fight for."
—
On the Net:
Information on PET scans: http://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/info.cfm?PGpet
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
2009-03-04 15:41:12
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Is my chemo working? Scans may give faster answer
By MALCOLM RITTER
,
AP
NEW YORK -When Mike Stevens learned his lungs were riddled with cancer, it took only a week to start chemotherapy — but six weeks to find out if it was doing any good. "You're going through all this suffering and stuff and you want to know, am I going to survive? Is this stuff working?" said Stevens, 48, of La Jolla, Calif. "Your whole life is in sort of a limbo."
Doctors typically must wait weeks or months to see if a treatment is shrinking tumors or at least halting their growth. But researchers are exploring a new use for medical imaging that could shorten the stay in purgatory, possibly revealing within a few days whether chemo is working.
That speed could save both lives and money. It would allow doctors to switch more quickly from an ineffective drug to a different one, and save health care dollars by waving doctors off expensive but futile treatments.
The same approach may also prove useful for monitoring radiation therapy.
This experimental imaging relies on a familiar hospital workhorse: PET scans, typically used for things like detecting cancer or revealing the effects of a heart attack. Unlike CT scans or MRIs, PET scans can show a tumor's internal activity, not just its size.
When used to assess the effects of cancer treatment, it can reveal inside information about what the therapy is doing to a tumor even when there's no outward sign.
To do a PET scan, doctors inject a patient with a radioactive substance that shows up on the scan in places where certain processes are happening — like hungry cancer cells gobbling up a lot of blood sugar. Think of it as looking around your neighborhood late at night for light in bedroom windows to see who is still awake.
Many cancer patients get PET scans now to assess their disease before treatment, or to spot recurrences later on. But except for lymphoma, PET scans aren't routinely used to get a quicker answer on how cancers are responding to therapy.
The new research tests both standard PET scans and a newer approach that involves injecting a different tracer substance.
The standard scan, which looks for blood sugar usage, has gotten good results in tests with a variety of tumors including breast, prostate, colorectal and esophageal cancers, said Dr. Steven Larson of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
"I think it's going to be extremely valuable for most tumors where there are effective treatments," he said. Some experiments have revealed chemo's effects within 10 days to two weeks.
As a practical matter, the goal of researchers is to convince federal regulators to cover the procedure under Medicare and Medicaid, which would open the door to routine use. That might take two or three years, he said.
Farther out on the research horizon is a PET scan that uses injections of a different radioactive material and has revealed chemotherapy's impact even faster. Larson figures it will be especially useful for assessing newer drugs that aim to stop a patient's cancer from growing rather than killing the tumor.
This scan is called FLT PET, after radioactive fluorothymidine. These scans show whether cancer cells are dividing. Uncontrolled division is a hallmark of active cancer, and stopping that division should be an early effect of successful chemotherapy.
"Our hope ... is you might be able to give a single dose of a chemotherapy agent and within a day or two figure out whether the tumor is going to respond," says Dr. Michael Graham of the University of Iowa.
If the tumor doesn't respond, doctors would "go on to Plan B," he said. "This is really ... giving us the ability to tailor the therapy to the disease."
Research into FLT PET is still in the early stages. Graham said there are maybe a dozen published human studies so far, most involving too few patients to draw a firm conclusion.
One report that impressed him involved 28 patients in Korea who were treated for advanced lung cancer — just like Stevens, who had to wait six weeks to learn whether it was working. The researchers reported that just one week after treatment began, they could tell with 93 percent certainty which patients would eventually respond to the drug and which would not.
In a much smaller study at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, seven patients with acute myeloid leukemia were scanned at various times during a week of aggressive chemotherapy. Normally, doctors wait a month after chemo is stopped to see if it worked. But the FLT PET scans offered an answer as soon as a day after treatment started.
"It's always hard to get too excited about a study that just involves seven people," said Dr. Mark Juckett, one of the authors. But "in these few patients, it looked like we could predict those who were going to respond well to chemotherapy and those who weren't."
Other preliminary studies suggest the new PET technology might be useful in gauging treatment for breast and brain cancers as well as lymphoma.
Graham figures there's a good chance FLT PET scans will become routine for assessing therapy in the next 10 years.
"It's a terrible waste of money to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on these patients when it doesn't do any good," he said.
Graham, president-elect of the Society of Nuclear Medicine, has been involved in discussions between the society and drug companies about incorporating FLT PET in their studies of experimental cancer drugs.
The hope is that, over time, FLT PET would prove reliable for giving a faster answer on whether an experimental treatment is working. That would save companies a lot of money, because they could spot ineffective drugs more quickly and not waste further research on them. And the drug company research would produce data to help persuade federal regulators to approve FLT PET for use in tracking therapy.
Dr. Samuel C. Blackman of pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. said he couldn't comment on the specifics of talks with the nuclear medicine group, but he said, "We're definitely enthusiastic about FLT PET" for cancer drug research.
Mike Stevens, the lung cancer patient, has seen his disease held generally stable by continuing chemotherapy since 2005. And along with the scientists, he also likes the idea of an earlier end to the limbo of not knowing whether a new treatment is working.
"It's like having a rope tied around you and you're leaning over a canyon at about a 45-degree angle, and you don't know if someone is going to pull you back in, or let go of it," he said. "If you get that encouragement earlier on that you're doing well ... you've got something to fight for."
—
On the Net:
Information on PET scans: http://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/info.cfm?PGpet
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
2009-03-04 15:41:12
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I think I figured it out.
I have been feeling Brad's loss A LOT over the past couple of weeks. I could not figure it out as there is no "logical" reason behind it, it's just been happening.
This morning as I was replying to John's post about the young girl at the cancer center, the tv on in the background with the NHL network on, it hit me. This won't make much sense to most of you and honestly I don't know why I am even posting it but I needed to get it out of my head and figured this was as good a place as any. I will apologize in advance as I know it's not the appropriate place or topic but....
Brad was a HUGE hockey fan. He is the person who finally made sense of the game for me and I have been "addicted" ever since.
Today is the NHL's trade deadline, THE day that all the big trades are made etc. This is a hockey fans Christmas so to speak. When Brad was alive, on deadline day he would spend the day emailing me from work to find out who the latest trades were, who was going where and the deals. That night we'd catch up on the rest of the NHL news and debate who got the best deals and all. It was the highlight of the season for him...
Today I am sitting here anticipating the big news items but without his opinions and input. 3 years later and this is so hard! I cannot explain it, I just know it hurts like hell and I have not cried like this in a long time.. Hopefully it's just more healing and by the end of the day I will feel better...
Again, sorry for the off topic content...Just really needed to get that out of my head.
Chris
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((((Kerri))))
Like Patti B, I have responded to your other post . I just wanted to reply here, too.
I am just so sorry.
My condolences and sympathy to you and your family.
Hugs and Prayers
Christine
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John
So glad to hear you are doing well.. Your account of the young girl has me in tears here. I hate this disease so much, as we all do...
I can remember one of 2 times Brad ever cried during his illness and that was one evening after he'd been to chemo and there was a young boy in the infusion centre next to him. That night was honestly the most heart wrenching experience I shared with him during his entire battle. He just sobbed and sobbed, not for himself but for that little boy and the other children who have to go through this hell.
Not sure why Brad has been so much in my thoughts the past couple of weeks but your account brought the tears to the forefront that I've been fighting.
John. thank you and God Bless...
Christine
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((((Kerri))))
I am so sorry.. Please know my thoughts and prayers are with you and your family at this difficult time.
Hugs, prayers and condolences
Christine
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((((Sue))))
You know you have my thoughts and prayers, ten~fold!
Will be waiting to hear the GOOD results!
And, you know I am here for you if I can help...
Love and Hugs
Chris xx
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No snowmen here yet. The snow is too dry and fluffy. And so much of it!! Well over a foot and still coming down lightly
As for snow dogs, the babies are tunneling!!!! It's so deep for them!!!
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((((Sue))))
Thinking of you and sending warm and loving hugs
Chris xxx
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Close to a foot here in western Mass.. I will get out and take pics later for ya. I am kind of wintered out already. Ready for spring!!!
Chris
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Congrats Becky!!!
I am so happy for you!
Hugs
Chris xoxox
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Randy
Lots of prayers and postive thoughts for you, Tamara and her Dad.
Hugs
Christine
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((((Lillian))))
I've been thinking of you and am so glad to hear what a wonderful time you are having!
Loved your update and am so very glad you shared it with us!
I hope you continue to enjoy your visit!
Hugs
Christine
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Hello Doug and welcome to the "family"
While I cannot say much about HAVING cancer, I have been a caregiver/family member/friend and can and do understand the anxiety and worry from a different point of view. It's not the same but those of us in my position are here to help and support as much as we can.
Please don't hesitate to let us know how we can help you and rest assured we will all do our best to do so!
Warmly
Christine
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Dear Linda...
My thoughts and prayers continue to be with you.
Warmly
Christine
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Hello Ann and welcome
I cannot add to what the others have said but wanted to welcome you and let you know we will do our best to help you and Mom
Warmly
Christine
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Marci
I am so sorry. Please accept my sincere sympathies and condolences on your loss.
Christine
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((((Alyssa))))
My heart just aches for you right now. I am so saddened to read this update and I am so very, very sorry for your loss.
I can understand your apprehension about visiting this site but please know that you are more than welcome here and we will do our best to help you through this horrible pain.
My sincerest condolences to you and your family,
Christine
PS.. please keep in touch. I will send you a PM with my private emial address...
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((((Nick))))
I so wish I had "the words" to make this day easier. We both know that is not possible. The best I can do is offer you my understanding and lots of hugs.
Happy Birthday dear Sophie!!
Love and hugs to you all today
Chris
Mom has been set free from her pain.
in GRIEF
Posted
I am so very sorry...
Many prayers to you and the family
Christine