Today we have a live blog of sorts.  The oncologist's office has wifi, so I brought my computer.  I can blog and watch the Tour de France while Cathy sleeps through the Zofran and Benedryl.  We arrived at the oncologist's office at 8:45, Cathy got her finger pricked for blood counts and we went into the exam room.  Her blood counts were all good, although white blood cells just a little low.  In the last few days Cathy had noticed that it was difficult to find the tumor as compared to a few weeks ago.  Before treatment the tumor was about 3cm and felt like a clearly defined oblong ball.  Now it is difficult to feel at all.  Dr. Drosick felt it and his response was, "Whoa, that's crazy.  This is really good.  You're responding well to the chemo.  It's kind of insane.  You'll have a good prognosis.  A lot of times we do surgery before chemo.  Then we don't know how the cancer responds to treatment and the prognosis is a little bit of guesswork.  When we do chemo first we know how it responds and we can get a more accurate estimate of prognosis."  That was a paraphrase, by the way.  His words reinforced the decision to do chemo first, especially for someone with a high risk of recurrence, like Cathy, with the BRCA1 gene.

At the present moment Cathy has her lead into the port, the nurse asked the doctor to call in the order, and we're waiting for the drugs to come back.  Cathy has such a great attitude about all of this.  She knows her hair will come back.  She says, though, that it's a good thing that we don't know when we're about to get sick because knowing it's coming is not fun.  As her eyebrows are beginning to thin out she joked with me, and then the nurses about the Seinfeld episode when Uncle Leo's eyebrows got burned off and Elaine drew them back on.  She is so silly and I'm so thankful that she has taught my children to be silly and appreciate silliness, as well.