Good News – Bad News

Last Friday I had a routine visit to the oncologist’s office for blood work. I also had my annual mammogram. Dr. Cook (the oncologist) told me that my blood work looked better than it ever has since I’ve been her patient. My red blood cell counts have doubled, and otherwise the lab results were beautiful. I found out that Dr. Cook has attended at least one seminar on treating cancer with a raw vegetarian (alkaline) diet, and she was positively impressed by what she learned. Dr. Schroeder (the doctor who handles mammograms) scared me when he said more imaging needed to be done - that usually means something ominous showed up in the first pictures -, but it turned out that the technician who took the original pictures had failed to take one that is part of my prescribed imaging. The additional imaging was done, and everything looks great.

Monday morning, Dr. Cook called me with further results from the blood work. A tumor marker (that’s the blood count that indicates a growing tumor) has risen from about 30 to over 200. Barring a mistake in the blood work, that means the cancer has returned. I will be having a PET scan at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow (Thursday) morning and a follow-up visit with the oncologist on Friday. Chemotherapy is her recommended course of treatment, but I’m not interested in doing that again. We have already begun to check out a lifestyle center near us in Loveland, Colorado, that uses several alternative therapies to treat cancer. Treatment at any lifestyle center requires a stay of several weeks, so a lot of details will have to fall into place for that option to work for us, but we are praying about it. We would appreciate many folks praying along with us about all of this.