The News On Sandi

I am finally home and Sandi is in the hospital at Medical City Dallas. Will be in several days.

The took some bone marrow from her left hip today to analyze and make sure she is a candidate for all this. If she isn't, there are some possible treatment options apparently, but the major hope here is that she is a candidate.

The plan is they will do another PET SCAN to get a baseline on her and then start high dose chemotherapy. She will have a session this week which will require her to be in the hospital so they can monitor it as this is much more powerful than they used before. After an unknown number of sessions of that---and assuming they can use her own bone marrow stuff----once they get her back into a temporary remission they will put her back in the hospital for three to four weeks. During that time she will be in quarantine while they harvest her bone marrow, take her own stem cells out of the bone marrow, and then inject her back with her own treated stem cells.

A couple of weeks later they would start more chemo at  a lower dose to try and kill the cancer and not damage her new improved stem cells. The odds on all this working are very low and the risks of something going very badly wrong seem to be pretty high. Not what one wanted to hear as things are significantly worse than we had previously understood to this point. She has not given up and said for me to make sure that everyone knows she is still fighting and very grateful for your prayers and support.

They are doing some sort of emergency paperwork for Medicaid and Social Security disability as well as helping with paperwork for various cancer foundations that may---or may not---be able to financially assist us with medical costs and do some sort of support services. All that will take time that we don't have, but they are trying to get the paperwork moving for us.