2.75 liters

Wednesday, August 16th, 2017
Baltimore, Maryland

​Yesterday

It’s been a rough couple of weeks since my radiotherapy ended. I've had significant discomfort and pain in my stomach and bowel, caused in part by the delayed effect of the radiation, but also by an accumulation of belly fluid (fancy word: ascites) that is increasing the pressure on everything else that’s packed in there.

The doctors decided to drain the fluid (fancy word: abdominal paracentesis) in order to both relieve that pressure and analyze the fluid itself to understand why it is being produced. The choices range from the relatively benign (e.g. infection) to the very serious (metastatic disease).

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In the middle of the three pictures below, you can see the 2.75 liters that were drained from my belly. On the left and right are the before and after pictures. After the 30 minute procedure, I lost an instant 5.5 pounds!

Today

That was yesterday's procedure. Today, I had a PET/CT scan in order to follow up on the same scan that was done before any of my treatment began. 

The PET works like this: you are injected with a glucose solution that has been laced with a radioactive isotope. After the solution has percolated throughout your body for an hour, they put you inside a machine that detects the radiation that is emanating from your body. Since tumors are hungrier than normal tissue, the tumors will consume more sugar and in turn more radioactivity, thus "lighting up" those tumors like stars in the night sky.

When coupled with a CT scan that is taken at the same time and overlaid with the PET scan, the doctors can determine the location of those tumors with pinpoint accuracy.

​As I've said before about of lot of this technology: pretty neat stuff, eh?

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Tomorrow

Tomorrow is the day of reckoning. We will meet with my oncologist to hear the results of three recent tests:

• Another bone marrow biopsy (from last week)
• Belly fluid analysis (from yesterday)
• PET/CT (from today)

If all three look good, then we will proceed as planned with the bone marrow transplant.

​If any of the three does not look good, then we will:

• Postpone the transplant
• Take a step back
• Understand the current scope of the disease
• Figure out how we might move forward from here

I am hoping to avoid this path for obvious reasons, but it does appear to be a very real possibility and one for which we need to gird ourselves.

Pictures

​Here are some photos that we've either taken or collected in the last week. ​​​

Tidbit

The NASA project that brought Eli to Argentina last month made it into the New York Times this month. You can find the article here:

Chasing Shadows for a Glimpse of a Tiny World Beyond Pluto

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