July Scans

For those of you that are still checking the blog to keep tabs on Trey, he had his 3 month scans last week (3 days of MIBGs and an MRI).

Dr. Casey said that there was no change from his scans 3 months ago - which is a good thing. The MIBG is not "lighting up" any brighter (which usually means the tumor is not growing or highly active), and the MRI showed that that tumor is the same size. As long as it's not growing, the doctors are happy. There were no indications of any new spots in other parts of his body, and his blood and urine tests were all in the "nornal" range.

So we will likely continue with the 3 month routine of scans until the doctors tell us otherwise.

As his oncologist has told us many times before, it could be years until they are willing to use the phrase "cancer free", as all they have to go by are a bunch of non-invasive scans and tests that look at tumor size, shape, location, trends and other characteristics to try to formulate a "status" of what's going on inside his body (vs. going in and biopsying). The neuroblastoma tumor could, in fact, regress to a benign harmless tissue, yet still show up on the MRI. Of course, we'd love to just see that the thing disappeared...but we are realists.

But, she said that the fact that since he stopped chemo treatment in October there has not been any indication that the tumor is growing, then she is confident that we are in a good place.

Thank you for all of your support and prayers, and keep them coming.

- Tim & Brandy