The End?

The last Taxotere?

Well, we got some interesting news today.  We're up here in Cleveland at the clinic for her treatment, the big week with two treatments, and Doctor M is confident that this, the 5th round of chemo should be sufficient to combat the cancer!  So, we could:
1.  Be done
2.  Just do the first week of the 6th cycle and get the normal 1 Gencitabine treatment
3.  Do the 6th cycle with two weeks of Gencitabine and no Taxotere
We talked about it for a while with the doctor and we landed on this action plan. As I stated above he feels very confident that 5 rounds of chemo is enough to kill off this cancer.  He doesn't have any data that suggested we must complete 6, but 5 should be good enough.  We however figure if we can do at least the 1st week of cycle 6, we would feel better and he frankly has not problems with that and supports that approach.  BUT, since this is week 2 of the cycles, this is historically when things go wonky for Denise.  Already these past couple of weeks the water retention has gotten pretty bad and she is up about 25lbs in weight just from the water. The plan for now we are going to wait and see.  If she makes it through this week without incidents of dehydration, UTI's or a frantic heart, then we are going to go with one more Gencitabine treatment.  If, however, we run into problems, then we may hold off or cancel all together.
We know we're not out of the woods yet.  There is still a lot of road ahead of us but at least there is a feeling in our hearts that there is even more road behind us.  She's got a new round of prescriptions called into the pharmacy so on our way home tonight we'll stop and get those.  Hopefully we can get rid of all this excess water in her system because that's the big stress on her system now.  If that can get regulated, then hopefully other things can get working and her healing from this can begin.
For now, we celebrate!