TIME PASSES SLOOOOWLY

when you're not having fun.
Things have not been terrible for us this month. But most news is not entirely encouraging.
To bring everyone up the speed:

After a wonderful family Thanksgiving, filled with hope and love, the other shoe dropped the next Monday morning. It seems that the pathologist who had given Bob a clean bill the day before Thanksgiving, found some cancer cells in the spinal biopsy after all. "Rare" cells he called them. Not rare as in unusual, but rare as in very few. Is this supposed to be a comfort or just his way of covering his ass for not finding them sooner? We are, naturally, going with the former.

So...next step is back to the oncologist. He tells us that we must now look for a treatment that will put the cancer into remission, since cure in no longer possible. The new prescribed treatment is chemotherapy without radiation or surgery. Three weeks on, one week off, for either three or four cycles, to be determined. He refuses to predict outcome.

Chemo is set to start on Thursday but first we must go back to the oral surgeon who tells us:
"no chemo until four extractions plus removal of bony growths in Bob's lower palate." The reason is the chemo treatment causes a bone hardening that will affect his jaw and make it impossible to ever do extractions afterwards, which means they must be done NOW, to be proactive.

Now chemo is pushed back two more weeks to give the oral surgery a chance to heal. Are you following me here??

After two weeks of eating rice, mac & cheese and quiche, the stitches are almost all out and chemo has started. The first week was uneventful. Four hours of a chemo drip and then home. No nausea to speak of. Some bowel issues that are improving. Thursday (this being Tuesday, I think) is the second treatment, if Bob's white cells remain acceptable.

So there we are. We will not know if the chemo sends this shit into remission until some time in March or even after. But we are in for the long haul and are still determined to keep that "stiff upper lip, " with or without the accompanying mustache.