Things were looking up!

While on the pill trial Dusty had to travel to Houston once a week for vitals and to meet with the team doing the study.  Some appointments were to just draw blood.  You would think a hospital like this would have a better system then having him fly out here for a day to give blood.?  Just a quick $300 roundtrip for the day, but not to mention his blood draws were at 7:00 am so that caused us to have to throw in a hotel stay.  Seriously!  But, we did everything that they asked of us.  Dusty handled the trial drugs very well.  He didn't get sick often and he was able to get out and about a good bit.  But he did suffer from very strong fatigue.  He stayed in bed mostly all day and would get out of bed for maybe two hours each evening to spend time with the kids but once they went to be, he was back in ours.  His muscles have deteriorated.  The next week I went to Houston with Dusty (Myself or my Dad would go to any major appointments, incase Dusty needed us for support).  On Thursday morning we met with the doctor and Dusty described the pains that he is having in his abdomen and liver area.  The doctor was also concerned with Dusty continuing to lose weight.  Dusty explained to him that he can't swallow.  He can barely drink creamy soup and is now living on Boost Plus.  He drinks four Boost Plus a day to get 1,440 calories.  That is all that Dusty lives on.  The doctor said he wanted Dusty to get in to do a PET Scan and see if it is worth continuing.  He also got us in to do an endoscopy to see what is obstructing Dusty's esophagus.  We started with the endoscopy, all went well.  The tumor is still there but is not active but there was a lot of scar tissue from radiation which was obstructing his esophagus so they burned off the pieces that were sticking out and did a balloon dilation (temporary fix).  The esophagus is like a marshmallow, they can blow it up with a balloon but eventually it will constrict back down.  He was so happy that he was going to get to eat again!  

Then, we went and he had a PET Scan done to see the progressional of his tumor.  The tumor had only grown 5% in four weeks!!!!  IT'S WORKING!  OH THANK YOU GOD.  THANK YOU THANK YOU!  We were thrilled.  The tumor was doubling every four to six weeks.  So a 5% growth in four weeks meant it had to be working.  The doctors said that 5% growth is within the margin for measurement error.  They said to continue the trial and re-stage again in four weeks.  Yay!  Life was good.

On week five of the 8 week trial Dusty caught the stomach bug (I mean, what more can he handle?).  I was forcing water and gatorade down his throat just so that next time he got sick he would have something to throw up.  I called MD Anderson and said that he wasn't going to make that appointment that week, they were fine with it.  After Dusty recovered he was back to not being able to swallow.  I don't know if all of the activity that went on in his esophagus caused it to constrict back down but he could not eat anymore.  Back to Boost.  

The next three weeks went by pretty quickly.  Dusty seemed to be improving so we were excited about the trial.  Dusty was feeling a little better and his color looked good.  

3/20/13