Christmas and New News

Here's Ben giving Santa a big hug when he came to visit before Christmas as he was passing through the neighborhood. Next we see the boys making cookies for Santa. Then there's Sam in his chef's costume as he tests out his new toy kitchen. Overall, the Christmas chaos ended well and we all had fun! The kids made out like bandits on the present front and the grown-ups didn't do too badly either.

On a more sober note, Sarah finally got tumor marker results at the doc's office on Christmas Eve and her numbers had gone up. CEA went from 3 up to 42 and CA27-29 went from 15 up to 70. This likely indicates that Gemzar is losing its effectiveness for her. Sarah's going to get a new MRI asap to see what's going on in her liver - scan Friday, results Monday. If the mets are growing again then she'll likely start on a new chemo right away. Sarah has been on Gemzar for approx. 6 months and her oncologist says that second-line chemo often only maintains efficacy for around 4.5 months on average. That doesn't sound good at all, but he says we still have a list of other chemo drugs to try and it's likely time to move on to the next one. In the back of our minds is the knowledge that several chemo drugs have not worked at all for Sarah so far... so it looks like we're back on the cancer roller coaster and anxious about the Monday doc appt.