kvetching up

Entry 1 9:42 a.m. Let me first say that Jenny has, no matter who it is you ask, the best PDAC oncologist there is. Period.  He is like the little French chocolate, non-pariels, of doctors.  That said, yesterday was again a day of frustration for me. I have so much concern for what the doctor said to us, and so many questions.  To raise those issues with Dr. P., who comes off as Moses sans beard, holding his stone tablet decrees, and me down below worshiping a golden calf.   Jenny's CA 19-9 went up: The doctor said it went up just a bit, nothing really to worry about. Really, he said, your cancer is stable, "maybe a little worse."  But stable.  The CA 19-9 numbers are see-sawing, but the general trend is through the roof.  42845.1 U/ml as of yesterday. Baseline, 14 months ago, was 846 U/ml.  So, its 42k higher. Jenny, as is her way, won't look for another week or so, and I, of course, per her wishes, won't share the information with her. Jenny...

 Entry 1     5:41 a.m. Awake since 3, worried about tomorrow. The scan results. The CT results. The treatment plan moving forward. It will be a very long day. We don't see Picozzi until 2 or 2:30, which means chemo will start an hour later, we won't be home until 6 or 7.

 Entry 1     6:55 a.m. A few weeks ago Jenny had a biopsy done on a liver metastases to identity whether there were any genetic sequences that could be targeted through immunothera py.  Immunotherapy is, as described by cancerresearch.org, a form of cancer therapy that uses a person's own immune system to fight the cancer.  Such treatment may include "targeted antibodies, cancer vaccines, adoptive cell transfer, tumor-infecting viruses, checkpoint inhibitors, cytokines and adjuvants." Adoptive cell transfer is the use of your own T-cells to fight the cancer.  Omi underwent this as a second-line response to her lymphoma.  It didn't work for her, obviously, but it can work and is a powerful tool fighting against cancer.  If Jenny's biopsy results demonstrated she was eligible for this treatment, the procedure entailed extracting T-cells from her bone marrow, growing it in a petri dish for a few weeks to create more, and then injecting them int...