Results from December 2013 visit with the Duke medical team

Monday and Tuesday we visited Duke for John's "every 8 weeks" MRI and the follow up with Dr. Friedman and his team to review the results.

This review, unfortunately, revealed recurrence of the tumor.  This is typical of GBM but we had hoped to forestall it longer.

As a result of this discovery we have moved to a new treatment plan. He has been on a monthly regimen of Temodar, which is standard of care. In addition, under the auspices of the trial at Duke, he has been undergoing bi-weekly infusions of Avastin.

The new regimen will discontinue the use of Temodar. He will continue bi-weekly with Avastin and add in an infusion of CPT-11 (aka irinotecan) on a bi-weekly basis. Every fourth week he will also be infused with Carboplatin.  So he will alternate every two weeks receiving either two drugs or three.

We had hoped that John would qualify for another trial underway at Duke that takes a polio virus, re-engineered to avoid its life threatening traits, and directly injects into the tumor.  The result is that the virus seeks to destroy the cell and additionally triggers an immune system response to attack the infected cancer cells.

However we learned that, due to the location of the new tumor, he did not qualify for this trial.

Clearly this wasn't the news we would ever want to hear but we remain positive that some good result will emerge at the end of this journey.

Thank you for all your support through these challenging times.  You cannot ever know how much we value it.

Oh no trip to Durham is complete without a BBQ report. Based on the recommendation of our friend Cedell, we journeyed out to Morrisville, NC to check out some very fine BBQ at Smokey's BBQ Shack.  I can personally testify that the brisket sandwich is delicious.