New Lung Biopsy with Chemo End in Sight
Greetings friends and family. Jason here. I apologize for the long time between updates. We’ve been keeping busy and each day has been full, and exhausting.
Wanted to provide a brief update. Lindsey has now completed five rounds of chemo, with the ideal goal being to have four rounds. So treatment has already been successful in the sense of being able to get above what the doctor hoped to give. The max she is allowed to have, due to cumulative toxicity, is six. Linds will likely be able to receive her sixth and final round this coming Wednesday, April 14. For that, we are thankful. It has been a loooong journey and a hard one, especially for Lindsey. But she has been a trooper, and I continue to marvel at her toughness and drive to fight through it. Assuming her bloodwork is at acceptable levels, we see no other physical reason with symptoms or otherwise, to prevent her from getting the escalated chemo dose of a sixth cycle. Please pray that she can have a sixth cycle and that she can tolerate and recover well physically from it.
After chemo, Linds will be put on what’s called a maintenance therapy and will have that every three weeks for the foreseeable future. Her maintenance therapy will consist of an immunotherapy drug and blood-supply-network disruptor, an antibody that affects blood vessel formation around tumor cells and networks.
In light of Lindsey finishing chemo soon and the conversation we had with the medical oncologist in NYC at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, we decided to have another biopsy of Lindsey’s lung tumor. When Lindsey was first diagnosed she had a tissue biopsy but, since then, we’ve only had blood biopsies. (A blood biopsy looks at circulating DNA and markers in your blood and can indicate which genetic or molecular tumor markers are present in your body).
As such, the hope for this procedure is that this biopsy might reveal a new genetic or molecular marker that could be targeted with a new therapy or clinical trial. For us, it’s worth a shot to ask the question again of the genetic testing process to see if it could reveal something new, something that could be specifically targeted. We’re doing this with the hope that we could ascertain some new information that could be useful in the future, beyond maintenance therapy. We know chemo is effective but a person can only have so much so we hope and pray for a new mutation/marker to show itself and for a new drug or therapy that can treat it.
Please join us in praying for this, for a new marker to target, or new therapy options.
That being said, the most current update is that I type this as Lindsey is in recovery from having the lung biopsy. She had a CT-guided lung biopsy this morning. The physician is confident he got enough tissue to send for testing. Accordingly, the procedure seems to have gone as well as expected. Lindsey will continue to be x-rayed and monitored to make sure her lung doesn’t either fill with air or collapse. But, we’re hopeful that the procedure has been successful and that sufficient tissue has been obtained for testing in the week(s) to come.
So now, we wait. And Lindsey recovers. And Lindsey has more chemo Wednesday.
Again, I cannot thank you enough for your support, your gifts to us, your prayer. It continues to overwhelm and humble us and please know we are grateful.
