11/7/18 November 7...how's that for a catchy title?

Here is your action news reporter Steve, hard at it again while Gabrielle plans her next Scrabble move.  She asked me to write this so as to distract me from the bigger Scrabble task at hand.  But I’m pretty good at multi-tasking, and she doesn’t know it, but I just got the “z” (10 points, 30 if I play it on a triple letter box)!

Anyhow, yesterday she had a CT scan, which was the first big scan she has had to follow the cancer since June.  We met with her oncologist this afternoon (just got back as a matter of fact).  The report was pretty good.  Not great, but good enough in my book.  It showed “some mild interval shrinkage” in the tumors in her liver.  The other areas of involvement had decreased slightly as well. Not a lot, but we’ll take it nonetheless.  In comparison with prior scans where things have been growing, this was a welcome report. We had all feared a big jump in the size of the tumors and involved lymph nodes.  On top of that, her tumor marker (CA 125) has dropped 20 points in just over two weeks.  It had gone up 50 points the time before, so it is nice to see it trending down again. It also bears mentioning that there are a lot of areas completely untouched by the cancer: lungs, kidneys, guts (bowels to us medical types), bladder, spleen, gall bladder.  Lots to be thankful for there, don’t you think?

Gabrielle, being Gabrielle, was disappointed that she didn’t have a report that said something like “huge interval shrinkage”, or the much coveted “NED…no evidence of disease”.  I understand where she is coming from.  The report shows that she is staying even, treading water, when what she really wants to be doing is to make huge strides in her battle against the cancer.  That is what she has done so often done in the past.  It is hard to fight so hard, suffer in so many different ways and hope against hope that all that suffering is paying off with huge advances in health.  That's not happening here.  
To me, it was good to see that the chemo is knocking things back yet again, slowly and hopefully surely.  It was especially heartening because of all the difficulty she has had with the current treatment (Taxol).  She’s been on it before, but these past few months have been especially hard on her with more fatigue, numbness and neuropathy symptoms in her feet, almost non-existent immune system (just on the front end of flu season, no less), and anemia, just to name a few things.  I am really not sure how many more rounds she can take.  But nobody is a stronger or more determined fighter than she is.  She is my hero.

Last week’s chemo session, for example, started at 2:30 and she didn’t get home till after 11:00 PM due to the need to get a blood transfusion on top of the chemo drugs.  She was pretty wiped out from it all.  Happily, this is an “off week”, so she can rest up till next Wednesday, when she heads in again.

Anyhow, that’s about it from here.  I need to scoot and get back to the Scrabble game. It’s a neck and neck match, even though I was able to use my “z” with “kazoo” on a double word score.  She answered back with “quad” and then “ax” just now.  Darn it. And the final score: Gabrielle: 309.  Steve: 298.  Double darn it!

Mellow afternoon at one of her "happy places": Blake Island 

DJ and Gabrielle trying to get me to agree to smuggle  Bambi home

Nothing like foraging for wild mushrooms!

I was so happy with today's test results that I gave Gabrielle this present.  She was so thrilled with it, she said, "I'll never part with this!"

Cannon Beach last week before the storm hit.