Parental Updates

Man, what a week! Here are the updates on my parents.

My Mom

Sunday, my mom, my dad and I drove to Stanford so that we could meet with a doctor on Monday morning to discuss a possible treatment for my mom's liver cancer, called radio embolization. We really liked the doctor and the proceedure sounds very promising. On average, it wipes out 80% of the tumors on the liver. That would be amazing!

Long explaination short, they go directly into the liver and inject what they said looks like dust. Each "dust" particle is a sphere and the spheres block the blood supply to the tumors and then inside each sphere is radiation so the radiation is delivered directly to the tumors. That is my lay-mans understanding of what happens. It is a 2 day proceedure - day 1 being 12 hours of testing and day 2 being 6 hours of the actual treatment.

The next step is trying to get the insurance company to cover it. The doctors said they usually do get them to cover it but it may take time to get it approved. So we are on hold until we hear that it has been approved. Then back to Stanford we go!

It was a lot of fun traveling with just my mom and dad and having that time to spend with just them.

Oh, and Kurt survived getting the kids all to school Monday morning. Although he did tell me when I got home that "it is a lot of work getting everyone ready in the morning. I'm not sure if you are aware of that or not!" Nope, I had no idea!!

My Dad

So 12 years ago my dad had a stint put in his heart to keep an artery open that was closing. They said that it should last him 5-7 years so we have been incredibly blessed that it lasted this long. He has been having chest pains and went in for tests on Tuesday. They did an angiogram (spelling???) where they go into the heart through a vein in the groin. It turns out that he needs 2 more stints so next week he goes in for that proceedure. At first they were thinking by-pass surgery so we are so grateful that they decided the stints would work and he didn't need a by-pass. So keep him in your prayers that everything goes good next week for him.