Post 11, Meeting Dr. Nicholas on Dec 24th and driving to Indy.
We arrived at the hospital around noon on Christmas eve and went to the neuro-oncology desk to pick up my lab order. Another stick in the arm and then we went to lunch for about an hour until they could measure those liver enzymes. We went up to Dr. Nicholas' area and met with Jean, our nurse coordinator who indicated that my enzymes had indeed gone down in those 5 days from 120 to 89. So, they were trending down after a short time and the changes in meds. This was encouraging. We then met the lead investigator, Dr. Nicholas who was as nice as can be. The previous week, we had met his associate, Dr. Lukas who works closely with him. Dr. Nicholas asked me if I wanted to see and compare the pre and post MRI on my brain before and after surgery and I finally had the courage to look at those images. I have to say, that the surgeon in Fort Myers (Javedan)) did do a good job of getting a lot of tumor out. But, there was still quite a bit there. The residual was to removed by the radio-oncologist, Dr. DeMasi via the focused beam irradiation. I found out later that there were 7 distinct regions to target there as part of my 6 week course. Dr. Nicholas again went through the order of the clinical trial and reinforced the fact that my enzymes had to come down to 70 by January 5th, if I was indeed going to get in. He also lowered my DEX dose down to 2 mg/ TID. So, I was now down from 6 TID to 2 TID, a 3 fold reduction. More about this later. By 2 PM, we packed into our Honda and headed down to our house in Indianapolis to spend Dec. 24th to Dec. 31th there for a brief respite that was quite welcomed.
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