Vodka can haz broccoli

Vodka’s adventures … and misadventures :)

A not-so-great couple of days

It has been a really rough couple of days. The tumor in Vodka’s shoulder has been slowly getting bigger - even with the increased Palladia dose, it seems like we’re just seeing more side effects than effects. He’s been hit with really bad diarrhea, probably the worst so far
Plus, we saw a little [...]

Surgery or not?

It has been almost 4 weeks since Vodka’s last chemo shot (Lomustine). We met Dr.Gillings (his oncologist) last tuesday and found that the internal mass in his shoulder had grown by almost 1 cm. Since then, it seems a bit smaller/softer at times, but there has been no significant change. We talked about various options [...]

And the chemo continues …

So, when Vodka’s surgery was done, there was this slim hope that maybe the chemo cycles can be cut back too. But Dr. Gillings wasn’t quite comfortable with doing that (as yet). And I agree with her strategy, for the most part - the biopsy from the surgery revealed the presence of mast cells - [...]

Biopsy results are back

When Vodka went in for surgery, Dr. Tamara Walker chose to remove the lymph node as well as chunks of surrounding tissue that did not look healthy. She suspected that the surrounding tissue could possibly be the lymph node capsule that had inflamed with the mast cells and had mostly died down because of chemo [...]

Phew! Surgery is done!

Yesterday morning, the Vodka went in for surgery to remove the infected lymph node. He was initially scheduled for radiation, but given how well he’s responded to chemo, Dr. Gillings (his oncologist) decided it was worth taking the node out and continuing chemo instead of just irradiating it. After a couple of back’n’forths about when [...]