Surgery date booked

At the clinical appointments this week we confirmed dates for a couple of future events. As expected, Robin will receive chemotherapy #4 next Monday and will spend the night in the hospital as an inpatient. There will be one more opportunity to receive chemo on November 6th - on nearly the last day of radiation therapy. Robin doesn’t look forward to the chemo treatments because of the nausea and weakness they impart. It seems ironic that the decision about whether she will receive chemo on November 6th may be based partly on how she is enduring her treatments. If she seems strong, then they will hit her with one more course!

She has also been booked for facial surgery on December 4th - four weeks after radiation ends. You may recall she lost her upper right molar in August when the tumor had dissolved away a portion of her upper jaw (apparently just the tumor putting pressure on bone can dissolve it). The surgery will entail removing some of her upper jaw, verifying that no cancerous cells remain and then rebuilding the area with a bone graft from either Robin's hip or leg. If any evidence of the tumor were discovered during surgery, they would skip the reconstruction and instead create a prosthetic device (kind of like a denture) for her mouth. The December surgery will require about seven to eight days in the hospital for recovery.

We've never backed away from scary questions so we asked "what if the tumor begins to grow again between the time the radiation ends and the surgery is planned". The doctor stated that it would be highly unlikely for that to occur, but if it did they could change their plan.