Update on My Dad

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Update on my Dad Current mood:  distraught As most of you know, the majority of my time during the past 2 months has been spent dealing with the discovery of my Dad’s liver cancer.  When we found out in January, the outlook was fairly grim.  He entered an experimental study with the drug company Merck to help test a potential new treatment.  The problem with things like this is that you never know in detail how the company sets up the study – Dad’s section of the trials was on dosage amounts.  Essentially, Merck is in the phase of trials where they test the amount of the drug necessary to start defeating the cancer cells.  (We don’t know how much medication Dad was actually recieving.) He was having increased pain and constantly running high fevers, so we had some doubts that the medication was having its intended effect.  In any case, we learned from the results of tests taken earlier this week that the treatment has had no effect.  More unfortunately, the tumor has grown rapidly.  Liver cancer is very aggressive, so this shouldn’t be too surprising.  It is heartbreaking, though.  The tumor has grown so much that we’ve been pulled out of the study and he starts emergency radiation treatments on Monday.  At this point, we’re trying everything we can to keep him alive and out of pain. I’d love for my Dad to be the first man to have a complete recovery from this, or at least not have the pain he has now. Pray for us, please, if you pray and keep us in your thoughts if you don’t.