not good

Mom's about to go to bed and is complaining of a headache. Not a good sign. If her headache is from the tumor, then we can expect more and more of this as time goes on.

Dad just gave Mom a Percocet. He says the last time she had a headache was around a month ago. It's easy to freak out and conclude that this headache is tumor-related, which would be consistent with our luck thus far, but at this point I don't really know what's causing it. I just hope Mom feels better.

Wednesday can't come fast enough; we have so many questions for the doctors. One thing we want NCI to do is give Mom another MRI. I just talked over the chronology with Dad, and it seems that Mom restarted radiotherapy around July 9. The scan was done on July 20, which means the tumor's robust growth occurred during the several weeks when Mom wasn't being treated, plus the first two weeks of the restarted radiotherapy (you'll recall that chemo restarted even later than that). That's about ten weeks for the neoplasm to have reached its current size.

We were told long ago that therapy wouldn't show significant effects until around Week 3, which calls into question whether the July 20 MRI is showing us an accurate picture of the tumor as it currently is. Has the in-tandem therapy done anything for Mom? Is the tumor even bigger now? We won't really know without seeing another MRI. Keep your fingers crossed.


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