A great website with information on Hodgkin's: www.lls.org
The cancer itself is pretty rare and great improvements have been made for treatments within the last few years. I guess you could say we "shopped" around a bit to see what the best treatment option would be for Justin. Considering his stage, the AVBD treatment [it's abbreviated, there are lots of words I can't pronounce, let alone spell :)] is pretty standard.
For those of you wondering how long/how many treatments, it is quite a number game that none of us can get straight. Justin will receive a total of 6 cycles. Now each cycle is two treatments. He goes for a treatment every two weeks, with two treatments a month, for a grand total of twelve treatments. If you ask him how long his chemotherapy is, you could get a variety of answers based on the explanation I just wrote. It makes sense why doctors have to spend so much time going to school.
Well, anyway, we like to go by treatments [remember, there is a total of 12 of those]. This past Monday he finished his third treatment, 9 left. So far he has responded very well. He has been extremely tired/fatigue. For every one that knows Justin, it is very different to see him laying on the couch. He even takes naps now [I have heard that nap time was NOT his favorite when he was a child]. Justin's hair has also been falling out. He has contemplated shaving it, but it has been falling out gradually. It hasn't been too annoying to him.
A quiz [for the teacher in me]: How many cycles does Justin have in total? I don't even know the answer and probably would resort to the paragraph above giving every possible scenario. Regardless of the treatment/cycles/etc, the goal is all the same. To say goodbye to this cancer: forever.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment