A good weekend before a long week...

Hello to all,

Kari is upstairs working on scrapbooks and the kids are asleep. I am procrastinating on doing some work in the office downstairs so I thought that I would update the blog.

We want to thank everyone who responded to our email from Friday. We continue to be overwhelmed with the support and words of encouragement that we are getting from you.

We had a nice relaxing weekend, which is what we needed after Friday and in preparation for this week. Kari's parents took the kids for the weekend. They had a full house with James, Katie plus Rob, Audrey and their twins Caroline and Olivia. Rob painted the girls' room so they were looking to get away from the fumes.

This video will give you a flavor of what Kari's parents had in store over the weekend with James, Katie, the twins, Rob and Audrey staying at their house.  It was taken after we spent the morning visiting great Mama for an early Mother's Day brunch. 



Kari and I just took some time to be together and decompress. We drank some wine with the neighbors last night, slept late this morning and went for a long bike ride. It was a good distraction. This is going to be a long week for Kari. Thursday and Friday are the pretty heavy days, with Thursday being the most demanding. She starts at about 8:00, spending the day bouncing around Loyola's campus, ending about 3:00. Over her travels, she will get a few MRI's, a bone scan, a CT and meet with a few more doctors. The whole goal of Thursday is to do all of the testing to make sure that it hasn't spread any further.

We know that it is in her right breast and the sentinel lymph node. Her chest x-rays taken last week were clear, so that's a good sign. All of the tests and information collected on Thursday will go into our meeting with Dr. Albain, the oncologist, for Friday. We'll start discussing a treatment plan with her then.

We have an opportunity to get Kari into a clinical trial for a new cancer treatment drug with Merck. This new notch inhibiting compound has shown to dramatically decrease the likelihood of cancer returning when combined with traditional chemotherapy. Dr. Godellas is amazed with the clinical results so far and is strongly encouraging us to participate in this study. We need to do a lot more research for ourselves but this looks promising. The only drawback to participating in this will be that they would need to do some additional tests on her in advance. It would delay any surgery by a few weeks.

Outside of that, we are trying to figure out how to handle this with James, who will be 5 in August. If all goes well, Katie will never remember any of this. James is smarter than the average bear and asks a lot of questions in general. We have to be prepared for that. We have been given a lot of good guidance on this but still need to come up with the best message. We probably won't talk to him until we know when Kari will be going into surgery. Until then, our message to him is that Kari is having some tests done.

Thanks again to all for your overwhelming support. We'll keep you all up to date.

Jay