Are Three Posts In One Day Too Much?

Greetings Loyal Readers,

Your Faithful Correspondent must confess that he is dreadfully tired, but neither rain, nor sleet, nor sleep deprivation shall keep YFC from his appointed rounds.

Well, when we left off, Mom had seen the Troll and was awaiting a visit with the Stork (you'd know who that is if you have been paying attention, but just to be clear, it's Mom's interventional radiologist Doctor Kent Sato). Well, we visited the Stork at his nest...err, the hospital across the street where Mom gets chemo.

And speaking of the Stork's nest, let's get to the story behind the story. That's right, examination rooms. I counted the tiles in Troll's exam room today. It was 7x9 so assuming each tile was 1 square foot (and it seemed a bit shorter that that) it was 63 square feet -- maximum. Between the little desk, the examination table, the sink and 2 chairs it felt a little like being in a phonebooth (kind of like the picture at right, except that it felt like Mom and I were actually in the phone booth, not standing outside it). Now, by comparison, the Stork's suite oozed an opulence befitting the Four Seasons (the hotel, not the music by Vivaldi). Let me tell you, it was plush. a large couch, big comfy chairs, a tv...all the room lacked was a minibar stocked with a can of $12 macadamia nuts. Well, now that you have the visual, onto the visit with the Stork...

There's a lot to cover, so YFC will try to summarize a bit...

• Mom will not be having radiofrequency ablation (RFA). The tumor on the liver is simply to close 5mm) to the heart, so that makes her a bad candidate since the heat from the ablation could possibly damage heart tissue.


• Mom is a good candidate for brachytherapy. In short, this involves implanting radioactive "seeds" (they sort of look like a grain of rice), in the liver. The seeds then focus on shrinking the tumor in the liver.


• Prior to the procedure, Mom would first have a mapping angiogram. Depending on what they find out, the doctors would either use Therasphere or Sir-Sphere (the two therapies are pretty similar). In either case, the basic procedure would go something like this, according to the Therasphere website:

To direct TheraSphere® treatment at tumors in the liver, a physician first makes a small incision in the patient's leg and places a long, flexible plastic tube called a catheter, into the femoral artery, which is the major blood vessel in the leg. Guided by fluoroscopy (an X-ray imaging technique that projects views of the inside of the body onto a screen) the physician then moves the catheter up through the blood vessels to the hepatic artery, which is one of two blood vessels that feeds the liver. The physician guides the catheter into the branch of the hepatic artery that feeds the cancerous tumor in the liver and infuses the TheraSphere® beads through the catheter into the blood that supplies the tumor. This is usually performed in a hospital's radiology suite and patients remain conscious throughout the procedure.

• The side effects are relatively minor -- fatigue (for 7-10 days is normal), loss of appetite, mild nausea over the first few days, and dull abdominal pain.

There was a lot of information divulged by the Stork, which is pretty ironic, given that storks have no vocal organs, are mute and thereby don't give a bird call (strange, but true). Mom is still taking in all of the information and is considering all of her options, including the timing of the procedure.

Finally, given that this is the season for primaries, it seems somewhat fitting that Your Faithful Correspondent should deliver you election results. All the votes have been counted and Your Faithful Correspondent was voted the favorite child by a landslide. Melvin's concession speech was particularly touching ("thanks for letting me live past 5 when I took your Life Savers..."). But most importantly, check out the picture to the left...photographic proof of our relative status (just to be clear, that's YFC signifying he's #1 and Melvin showing that, like Avis, she's going to have to try harder).

Well kiddies, Your Faithful Correspondent is all blogged out. We'll talk again soon, k?

Faithfully,
Corey