Finally

I am so sorry for delaying this post for so long.  It has been a long 3 months for both Jenny and I with the planning of the golf tournament and then helping out with the BrightLife house.  For those that don't have Facebook we raised a little over $17,000 for iTOR from both the foot traffic at the house and the golf / silent auction.  We are still waiting on the money to come in from the sale of the house, but when it is all said and done the money that was raised will allow every patient the comes through the Greenville Health System for the next year and has surgery to remove a cancerous tumor to get the genomic sequencing done.  This will help the oncologists to find a drug faster and that fits their tumor profile.  It was a lot of work but it was all worth it.  There were so many people that helped out with both of those events and if I tried to name everyone I know that I would leave someone out, so I won't even begin to try.  But, thank you to everyone that contributed to both of those events.

On to health news.  Jenny and I had been worrying that the tumors might be getting worse because my CEA was rising to a really high level.  I don't know what the exact number got to but I know that it was really high.  The thought was the drugs I am currently on were not working, however, this was not the case.  Dr. Edenfield noticed the rise in CEA and immediately scheduled me for a CT Scan to see if it had spread to anywhere else.  I got the test done on a Thursday and was scheduled to meet him on Monday to discuss the results and the new path we were going to take.  When he walked into the room I knew that he had good news.  He had a slight smirk on his face and said that the CT Scan showed moderate improvements overall.  What was happening is something called "Tumor Lysis" which basically means the tumors were exploding from the inside and causing small fragments to be released into my body and confusing my CEA into thinking that it was new tumor growth rather than dying off.  Once we got this news he also informed us that my CEA took a significant drop.  Again I don't know exactly how much it dropped since I don't want to know but apparently it was a very big one. So the plan now is to keep on the same treatment plan as before with chemo every other week.

In other news we went up to Old Edwards Inn the day after the tournament to celebrate our 3rd wedding anniversary and have been going pretty non-stop every since then. We still have some thank you notes to write from the tournament, things to be put away that are currently sitting in our garage or on our stairs but hopefully we can get back to normal soon, whatever that means.

It feels good knowing that we were able to raise money and we got good news all in a small period of time.  I hope that everyone has a great week.

Tim