That's right friends, we're hauling out the Weapons of Mass Destruction!
As some of you already know, my wife Bonnie has been dealing with cancer for the past 2 1/2+ years. It started in the gall bladder, which was removed in Feb. 2003, followed by a liver resection in March (they took out a sliver of the liver). Semiannual scans ensued, which were clean until Fall 2004, when they found, almost by accident, a small tumor on her liver. A PET scan revealed another tumor on an ovary. She had surgery in October last year to remove those and six months of chemotherapy after that. A couple of clean scans allowed us to catch out breath, but her November scan showed 4 masses in the right lobe of the liver. In, not on this time.
We were referred to the University of Maryland, where they do this new procedure called SIRT - Selective Internal Radiation Therapy. They will go into her femoral artery with a catheter and snake it up to the hepatic artery, where they will implant millions of microspheres, each one less than 1/3 the thickness of a human hair, which have been irradiated. They will collect in the capillaries feeding the tumors and block off the blood supply to the tumors while at the same time emitting beta particles to directly bombard the tumors with radiation. This procedure is extremely selective for tumors (a ratio of approximately 30 to 1) because of the fact that tumors are fed by the artery while the healthy liver tissue is fed mainly by the portal vein. Amazing.
We're pretty confident that this will help greatly, but would still appreciate good thoughts, prayers, visualizations, anything along those lines. She'll be having the first phase of the procedure Thursday the 22nd. It's an outpatient procedure, much like an angiogram in practice. We should be home in the early afternoon. We're expecting her to be feeling fairly good by Christmas morning. They will do the right lobe first and then do the left lobe sometime in mid-January.