Wednesday, January 28, 2015

I took MJ over to my parents' house while I went in to the Huntsman clinic for my dr's appt.  Everything was clear with my CT scan and lab work.  I asked the doctor if she thinks it is worth it for me to stay on the veliparib drug and she said she definitely thinks it is helping to keep the cancer away - but I can take myself off of the study at any time if I want to.  They are hoping that the drug manufacturers at some point will let us scale back on the CT scans and allow us to space that out more. I asked about the parp inhibitor drug that was just approved by the FDA for cancer treatments and the doctor said that I would not qualify for it (or my insurance company would reject the treatments) because they require that you have to have tried the standard chemotherapy options 3 times before they will pay for the drug.  Also she said that the other drug has to be taken something like 8 times a day.  She thinks that the drug that I am on is a much better version of parp inhibitor.

They tested my vitamin B12 level and it was actually slightly above the normal range - so that is not what is causing my red blood cells to be abnormally shaped.  They think it is just the drug that I am on - although they have not seen that side effect in everyone that is on it.