Hospital Update

Hey everyone! We don't all of the pieces of the puzzle as to what is ailing Mike yet, but we will soon! We have however, gotten a few more pieces so I thought I would do a quick post to catch you all up with what we know. We still have the bronchoscopy for Mike's lungs scheduled for today and it should take place around 11:30am. We are hoping to find out where the bleeding in his lungs is coming from and while they're in there hopefully they can cauterize it and we'll be done! Before they do the procedure though, all his blood work had to come back normal. He had low vitamin K levels since we were in the hospital last time and nothing has changed. They have been giving him vitamin K pills since we got here, but his number isn't normal yet so he is going to have another plasma with vitamin K infusion this morning before the bronchoscopy. This is no big deal to us as he already did it the first time he was here.
     We also heard from one of the med school students that the CT scan of his pelvis looks pretty good. While the mass is still there and hasn't gotten a lot smaller, it is no longer infiltrating the bladder and looks like it is sitting alone. If it is really a hard shell filled with dead tissue and old blood as we were told before, then it would stand to reason that no amount of radiation or chemo will actually "shrink" it. It definitely could have killed the outer shell of live cancer though, so the fact that it shows no growth is terrific. The only thing concerning on the scan is that there are small stress fractures in his pelvis and one in his femur bone. This is because we knew from the PET Scan on the last day of Feb. that the cancer is in those bones. We are hoping that the chemo will continue to kill the cancer in those bones and that time will heal them. We won't know for sure until they do another PET scan and right now that isn't scheduled for another 4 weeks from now. They want him to complete another round of chemo before they do that scan.
    The only other thing to report is that Mike starts round two of chemo tomorrow. Since he's already in the hospital they can give it to him from his room while he is comfortable in his bed. Then as long as the bronchoscopy looks good today we go home! Yay! I have been telling the doctors all morning that if they try to keep us here over Easter I will throw the furniture on the floor!! I think it embarrasses Mike :-)