PET scan results

Praise the Lord! No other cancers were found! The PET scan showed "hotspots" in the margins of her surgical site and her doctors cannot differentiate between healing & cancer growth so they are recommending radiation therapy (RT) 5 days a week for 6-7 weeks. They are saying it will be "baby doses" or smaller amounts of RT and we think it will be done with a special type known as 3-D CRT or Three-dimensional Conformal Radiation Therapy. 3D CRT is most commonly used for prostate cancer treatment as Mom & I are learning while attempting some research on the computer tonight. It will be good for the tricky area the hotspots are located: near her aorta. Another thing we are finding is how rare her type of cancer is. Leiomyosarcomas effect 4 out of every 1 million people...and Mom is one of now 3 people that she knows that has it!?!

Mom is in good spirits and enjoying her family, Dad came home tonight from fishing as he had a broken water pump on the boat. The last pump lasted 20 years and when he replaced it on the fishing grounds with his spare it seized up after working only two minutes! SO he had to come back to town and was thankfully able to exchange the new but broken one with another new one for free, even though the price had gone up $150 since January!?! We are all enjoying one anothers company and Eleanor had her last night of Vacation Bible School tonight, what a great week for her! She really clicked with Krista, a teacher for the church's second grade class. She knows sign language and we enjoyed learning some signs for the songs we were singing at VBS. Oscar is fighting a nonproductive cough that mostly afflicts him at night so we have had some late nights (or early mornings, depending how one looks at it!) together. We have one more week in Alaska before heading home to Virginia.