More Bad News

Well, we take one step forward and then two steps back. Today we got the news that the pathology from his second surgery which looked at more of the tumor showed that the tumor is stage IV not stage III as thought earlier. A stage IV glioblastoma is called glioblastoma multiforme or GBM. Basically this means that the tumor is more aggressive and faster growing than thought. There is some subjectivity in reading pathology from slides and our radiation oncologist even said we could line up ten pathologist and six would say one thing and four would say another, but they compared this slide with the one from the first surgery and feel that the first diagnosis was correct, but that the new sample shows more signs of a stage IV. GBM is much more common in adults and is rare in kids, and again the location of this kind of tumor in the posterior fossa is rarer. You can look up pediatric GBM here: http://www.childrenshospital.org/az/Site962/mainpageS962P0.html for all the details.

Basically this changes his overall prognosis but not the treatment plans. He will still start radiation tomorrow and it will last for 6-7 weeks. Again there is no known chemo that works for GBM and Joe will start his experimental Tarceva tomorrow as well. He will be sedated for the radiation every day, but the actual radiation only takes a few minutes.

It seems like we can't even start to get a grasp of our situation before the situation changes. We continue to need your prayers and support. Please specifically pray that the radiation treatments will go smoothly and that Joe will not have bad side effects from it, that he will continue to progress in his physical therapy, that he and Holly would sleep at night, and that Gillian and I would communicate well. It helps us to know that there are so many out there praying for us and continuing to have hope.