After two weeks of relative calm, limited headaches/vomiting (and quite an impressive amount of school attendance) it’s been quite a few days Chez Church. Last Friday was 3 months ago to the day that Fin had his “full macroscopic resection” to remove his brain tumour and yesterday was his first MRI scan since the morning after surgery. This weekend has felt like walking through treacle. Every bone in our being was saying “after 6 weeks of intensive radiotherapy, daily chemotherapy and fortnightly Avastin surely nothing could grow back so quickly in those circumstances?” but in the early hours of the morning Wayne and I have been absolutely petrified about the first MRI. Fin didn’t want to go on Monday for his MRI scan and we had a few tears Sunday night. Although he has done the radiotherapy for 6 weeks, head secured to the table in a mask, the MRI’s are so much longer and more uncomfortable. The previous scans lasted approx 45/50 minutes. He was sedated with morphine at the last one and lots of kids have to have a general anaesthetic. When we went in yesterday they warned us there was a lot to do and it would take around an hour. In actual fact he was in the scanner for an hour and fifteen minutes - no sedation. They pulled him out after 45 minutes to put a contrast die through his central line then he went back in for fifteen minutes (which ended up being half an hour as he moved and they had to re-do some parts) He was trying to mouth something to me at the end but I couldn’t hear what he was saying as he machinery is so loud (apparently it was “how much longer?”) then right at the end he pressed his emergency buzzer. A voice came over saying “just 30 more seconds”, then we were done. Then we went home and started the wait for results.... The oncology team have said that it will take 5 days for the full analysis to be complete as the radiology teams have to look at up to 500 shot comparisons to see all the minutae of what’s changed since his previous two scans. HOWEVER, at oncology clinic today, Professor Peet showed us the scans. He only tends to look at the scans ‘topline’ but he says there are certainly “no big lumps”. The area where the tumour was removed looks smaller than post op and contains some liquid but NO visible signs of a tumour. There are a couple of specks elsewhere on the scan but he believes these are typical following intensive radiotherapy treatment on a large area of the brain. So we are in the best place we could hope to be at this time. It’s a big step forwards but we are conscious it is only one step on what is going to be a very long journey . Having said that, the champagne has been cracked open in the Church house tonight. We are going to celebrate all these stepping stones along the way. Next chemo cycle will start in approx 2 weeks and we will once again face the battle of the tablets; we have the eye department at BCH on Monday for assessment of impact of tumour on peripheral vision; but for tonight we are drinking champagne... xxx
Posted on: Tue, 30 Sep 2014 19:23:24 +0000