Dad had an appointment with medical oncology (chemo doctors) yesterday. The results of his latest CT scan showed that the cancer has grown, and is now starting to associate with the main vein in his neck (and it has already tightly grown around his carotid artery, like I mentioned in this post). The doctors are happy to give chemo a go for a few cycles, to see how it will affect the tumours growth (it won't shrink it, but hopefully it will slow its growth). They gave Dad two options concerning how they can administer the chemo:
A) A huge "blast" of chemo, non-stop for four days (which he will have to stay in hospital for as they're giving him the drugs 24hrs a day) every month,
B) Just "normal" chemo (i.e. he'll go in as a day patient, have it infused and then go home again).
He can choose to stop treatment at any time, and if the "blast" of chemo makes him feel too sick he can switch to "normal" chemo.
These are only rough explainations- I'm not going to go into a lot of detail as it's just so confusing and hard to explain.
Anyway, Dad chose to have the "blast" chemo. He'll have to have a PIC line inserted into his upper arm, so they can give him the continuous chemo. Depending on how he takes it, for the next cycle there's a possibility he could have it at home and just carry around the chemo pump with him- but we'll see how that goes.
They sent us home and told us to expect a call in the next few days. Today we got a call from the hospital saying they have a bed available for him, so at 2.15 today he's getting admitted and they'll put the PIC line in, and then hopefully they'll start chemo tomorrow.
Dad is starting to get really tired, but he's doing okay.
Thank you for all your love and support.
Sorry we haven't called anyone, there's been no time. I'm writing this as Mum's packing Dad's bag for his hospital trip. Rush rush rush.
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