Journal entry by Anne Piraino —
This week was round 7, so it’s been 14 weeks of treatment. They gave him Benadryl, apparently at this point he needs a shot of it. He is doing ok, some things are changing, he’s starting to lose memory & some anxiety & depression issues, expected...they said timing is around now ... apparently they have been questioning him about these issues but he has not shared that with me. I can vouge for him that all these things are happening. I think he’s in denial, which is normal, but it took him a while to finally admit it, again normal. The social worker is calling and they’ll put him on something. His oncologist has been updating the doctor at Roswell in Buffalo, and he in turn went to a team of doctors that looked at his case and have decided to do a laparoscopy first, and then a procedure called a Hipec, where they inject a heated chemo drug directly into the nodules in the abdominal area. Since this is injected directly they say that the chemo is much more effective in shrinking or killing these tumors (nodules). They say the recovery is about two weeks. I don’t know yet if I can be with him for surgery and we also do not have a place fir me, they just refer to a hotel. We don’t know how long he would recover there or if he could come home. We do know that he would then continue with another 8 rounds of chemo. That should bring us to maybe July. In the middle of all of that and after surgery they will continue to do more scans to check progress. So, A colonoscopy is scheduled for tomorrow, and we have a consult in Buffalo this Wednesday to discuss the surgery, and get answers to all our questions. I’m guessing by end of Feb, beginning of March they’ll schedule it. Peter feels ok, just a little tired. He has never gotten sick at all but still can not deal with anything cold, food, drink, weather, touch. The week of the chemotherapy infusion is worse, the week in between is only a bit better. A lot coming up in these next few weeks, he just had a Covid test and is getting a letter this week to be able to get the vaccine in the next round. Because of Covid limitations we probably will not be able to get away to Florida at all as we had hoped to this winter, as definitely a stress relief for this past year, but it looks like that’ll have to wait for now. Thank you for your continued prayers.
#faithnotfear
Anne
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