Third Email: Health Update 3

July 3rd, 2013

Hi all,

It's ridiculous how much has happened in the past two weeks since my last update. I'll do my best to keep this email informative yet as brief as possible... but no promises.



Two weeks ago I began Intravenous Fertilization treatments (IVF) to preserve some eggs before doing chemotherapy (while chemo does't always cause women to become infertile, it can reduce fertility to varying degrees). After a crazy amount of shots and blood tests (on top of finishing up the school year), I had retrieval surgery last Thursday. Apparently I was ridiculously fertile; as the folks next to us were excited about their results of 3 eggs, the docs were able to retrieve 24 from me, which, thanks to Tom's input, yielded 15 embryos that will be frozen for later potential use. As someone mentioned (my brother maybe?), apparently we could start our own baseball team.

Retrieval surgery was well timed, as we closed on our house and moved in on Friday. Fortunately, we had 10 people that day and 14 people on Saturday to help us pack, move, clean, and unpack. Beyond signing the paperwork and telling people where things go, I wasn't much help. Thanks to all of you who were there and helping us out, we could not have done it without you.

This week I started on radiation treatments on my knee. I will be going into Boston every weekday (excluding the 4th of July, and the weekends) between now and the second week of August. All the folks there have been super nice and helpful as well as efficient. The visits take 20 minutes at their very longest, and really I'm only in there getting treatment for about 7 minutes total. There are little to no side effects of radiation, which is great, and I am also able to drive myself to and from appointments with no problems, so it's all around an easy process.

Now that we're done with IVF, I'll be starting chemo. It looks like I'll be starting treatments next week, doing three days in a row, a fourth day of immune system booster, then taking two weeks off before we start up again for another round. It sounds like I'll be doing three rounds of chemo, and then we'll see where to go next. Apparently treatments for sarcomas are hard to predict far into the future since so much depends on each individual person's response to treatments, so there's a lot of "we'll see what happens". Somewhere after chemo I'll be doing surgery on my knee, but again, we're not sure when yet.

Overall, our most recent meeting with Dr. Butrynsky (oncologist) felt - to me - significantly more positive than previous meetings, though Tom tells me that they weren't really any different, it's just my interpretation and perspective that has changed. Either way, I am very encouraged about my treatment at Dana Farber, and find it easy to see this as just another pebble in our shoes... ok, so maybe it's a large pebble, but it's still completely walkable. And it helps to hear about all the people thinking about us; as news spreads, we are getting more and more emails, phone calls, texts, and messages of good vibes and healthy thoughts from all over the place, which gives us that much more oomph to get through each day. And if anyone is in the area, feel free to stop by our new place, we've got lots of space to share.

Lots of love,
T&A