Good News!

Manford had an MRI today--we were very worried, because we saw the oncologist yesterday and he was very concerned about the variety of symptoms Manford's been having over the last month (ie, difficulty walking, orthostatic hypotension, memory problems, word finding problems, weird numbness...), and decided to do a scan in spite of the fact that it might be ambiguous from the radiation, in order to try to decide whether and how to proceed with chemotherapy. We just had a very brief meeting with the doctor, who was running off to something, but was good enough to get it all done very quickly and tell us the results himself. He said it looked better than the previous scan, where there were several small tumors (he said two before, but apparently there were other smaller areas of concern); now some of them have disappeared, and the margin of the area (what does that mean...I think it is the area around the hole where the tumor was, where they worry about tumor cells still being there) is thinner (I don't know how they see this. we will have more time to talk about it next month), and generally he was very pleased and quite surprised. Manford is starting on the first of six monthly rounds of Temozolomide today, then; I think the hopeful thing is that the implication is that this tumor does respond to Temozolomide (which was given during radiation).

We are going out to dinner now to celebrate.
Carrie