Thursday, March 6th

Well, here we are again - at the NIH in Maryland. Glenna, Bob & I came down yesterday for two days of scans, tests and results discussion with her doctors. Unfortunately, things have taken another twist in this roller coaster ride. Instead of hearing the good news that her tumors were all shrinking, we were told that all, except one of them were actually growing - slowly, but growing none the less. This was devastating news for us all - especially Glenna. After her first cell replacement treatment, there was good signs of shrinkage in some of her more visable tumors. Needless to say, we got pretty excited about that. Then she had the treatment again because they didn't see enough shrinkage in her internal tumors and wanted to hit them again while they were down. But the second treatment did not seem to do much. There is not a clear explanation of why - as all these procedures are really still experimental, but one theory is that because she had her cell growth from the aphereses procedure - and not from her actual tumor cells - the cancer-fighting gene that was injected into the cells may not have been the exact match for the type of melanoma cells that Glenna has. It may have worked on some of her cells, but not affected others.
So now Glenna has two options: one is to do another type of chemotherapy alone, or to surgically remove one or more of her more accessable tumors and to try to grow more cells to re-inject back into her to fight these active tumors. She has opted for the surgery and another try at cell infusion. They were able to fit her in for surgery tomorrow morning - so we're going for it! She will recuperate from surgery tomorrow and may be able to go home as early as Saturday. Sometime within the next 2 weeks they will know if the cells are growing - if so, she will probably have the treatment in about 3 weeks. If they don't grow, well, we will have to cross that bridge when we come to it.
I will let you all know how she does through surgery and we will need lots more prayers that these cells will grow like wildfire!
Glenna had a very hard day emotionally, but as she usually does, she has rallied to the task at hand and is ready to move ahead. I can't believe her strength. I am in awe.
Until the next time, love to you all, MK