Consultation Day

So my mom, my new (well, new to the blog - it's been six months) girlfriend Melissa, and I met Dr. Robert Witherspoon at the Seattle Cancer Care Center (http://www.seattlecca.org/) in Downtown Seattle. He basically echoed everything that Dr. Weeks said, and spoke that the Stem Cell Transplant would be the best course of action. While he didn't tell us a ton that we didn't already know, it was great that everyone (Dr. Witherspoon, Dr. Weeks, and us) were all on the same page. We also got a tour of the facility. It is an absolutely beautiful building, and looks to be a very state-of-the-art facility. Overall, this calmed us down tremendously.

Dr. Witherspoon laid out a timeline of what we could expect. He requested a biopsy of the mass in my chest (the nodes in my neck were not large enough to biopsy), which would take a few weeks to get and analyze. After that, I would run through a couple rounds of chemotherapy here in the Tri-Cities before heading to Seattle to have some of my stem cells harvested. This would be around mid-May. After that, I would return home for a couple of weeks while everything was set up for the summer. Then I would return to Seattle in early-June to start the transplant process. I would likely spend the next 10-12 weeks there running through the transplant process. The actual transplant would be in mid-June, and the next 8-10 weeks would be recovery.

Overall, I feel great that there is a gameplan now. I've spent the last 7 weeks on pins and needles worrying about what is going to happen. I was basically sitting around knowing that I was "sick" but nothing was happening to get better. I spent the rest of the weekend with Melissa and her family in Surrey (suburb of Vancouver, BC). We had a great time, and it was nice to take my mind off of the whole situation for a couple of days.