This blog exists so that your email boxes won't be so cluttered. I'll just record the events of the summer here and hopefully keep friends, family, and colleagues posted as to my treatments this summer.
Currently the schedule is:
June 6th: Remove 11 lymph nodes from both sides of my neck and above my collar bones. This will happen at Wash U in St Louis. I should be in the hospital for 1-2 days afterwards. Hopefully I'll be climbing and riding my bike the monday afterwards ; )
Sometime in June: get some shots (G-CSF for you medical folks). Then get my stem cells harvested. These will be for a rainy day if I ever need 'em after my radiation treatment this summer
July 7: Show up at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. For the next week and a half, I'll be going to the hospital on a daily basis. On the 7th I'll receive a very small amount of radiation (I'll drink it out of a little vial with a straw) and a shot with a fake (recombinant) hormone that makes my body think I don't have any thyroid hormone (rTSH). Each day afterwards, I'll get my blood drawn and a scan. The idea is to 'study' how my body deals with the radioactive iodine that I drank so that they can calculate the largest amount my body can handle.
July 17: Drink a big 'ol dose of radioactive iodine. yum. Then I'll be bubble boy for a day or two and have to stay in the hospital.
One week later on July 24: I get a scan and a meeting with the doctor to see where the iodine was taken up...which we already know will be my lungs and we hope will not be my neck since we're hoping the surgery takes care of my neck.
Some number of months later: hopefully I'll have a blood test and it'll show I'm finally (after 3 years...diagnosed in 2005) in remission! Sweet.
