Update - Praise God

Okay, here is the latest scoop on Dad's treatment and progress. First and foremost, keep up the praying. The scriptures posted earlier today are our arsenal. Please keep it up because God is answering and Dad's pain has gone away!!! Last week, about midway through he realized that, although his stomach was a bit upset, the rib cage pain (the only real symptom he had of the cancer), had gone. The tiredness, most likely a by-product of the Talabostat because it lowers his blood pressure, persisted throughout the week. When he got his blood work done, his hemocrit and red blood counts were up (the Talabostat is working) - this is good. The transport mechanism is working well. His platelets and white blood counts are down, but still within normal ranges. This is what they expected to happen, so no surprises. He had a CT of his pelvis done last week before he could start the the treatment, and they were able to get the abdomen also. So we had an updated look at the tumor (it had been 3 1/2 weeks since his first CT diagnosed the cancer, so we had no idea how fast the tumor was growing). The pancreatic tumor grew approximately 1 cm. from 7-7.5 cm on the first scan to 8.3 cm on this scan. The liver tumor grew about .5 cm from 3.5-4 cm on the first scan to 4.3 on this scan. While no growth was preferable, this was encouraging as pancreatic cancer can advance a lot more quickly than this. And that's before we ever started any treatment. We got the results of the CA 19-9, which tests the amount of cancer antigen in the blood. The higher the numbers are not good. His CA 19-9 (taken the first week he was diagnosed) was 37,479. While this number is quite high, we all knew his condition when we started this journey was grave. We will have another blood test taken at the mid-point of the chemo (3 more weeks) and this should give us some indication of how he's responding to the treatment. Tomorrow, I'll post updtaes on all the additional therapies we are utilizing to enhance the care he's receiving at Mary Crowley. All this has been checked with his wonderful doctor, Dr. Nemunaitis. We have received his blessing for all that we are trying. Continue leaving posts as Dad gets these directly to his email each day and they are such an encouragement. Most make him cry, but don't tell him I said that. (He doesn't always read the blogs, just the comments.)