The Summer of the Traveling Tumor

This summer my family and I took a vacation in Grand Cayman for my “Make A Wish.”    It was the first time my tumors and I had ever parasailed, jet skied or snorkeled with sharks.    We also swam with sting rays, did some shopping and fishing.   It was an action packed week.   Did you know that the legal drinking age in Cayman is 18?  Neither did daddy. :)
Unfortunately, the reason I had so much energy was that my cancer had reoccurred and these new tumors were over-producing adrenaline.  Fiddlesticks!   When we returned home I had routine scans that showed three new tumors, including one in my original tumor bed (OF WHICH WE JUST RADIATED!) 
These tumors grew really quickly considering hey they weren’t on my scans just ten weeks ago when I last had surgery!  I started a new chemo regimen last week. It’s a 21 day cycle. At the end of July I will have new scans to see if this chemotherapy is working. Whether or not it is probably won’t be clear because three weeks is a short period of time, but we need to see some stability or shrinkage ASAP at the rate these suckers are growing.
I also have a meeting set up with a new group at Dana Farber to discuss tumor profiling and clinical trials. Although I already tried tumor profiling at the University of Michigan and it was unsuccessful, the tumor profiling at Dana Farber takes a different approach and anything is worth trying. In short, tumor profiling consists of doctors analyzing the DNA of my tumors and looking for known gene mutations that have been seen in other cancers. This leads, hopefully, to treatments associated with those mutations. This would point me towards a treatment that should work instead of trying more random chemotherapies. Clinical trials are new drugs that are being tested before they are FDA approved. There is some promising research being done and it may make sense for me to look at these as well. In the case of joining a clinical trial, I would become a human guinea pig and I mean maybe some magic will happen, who knows!
I know this is a bunch of information that sounds mainly negative but I feel exactly the same as I did ten weeks ago, which was and is perfectly normal. I hope everyone is having a great summer!