A bit ‘o news

Well, I don’t have all that much to report on the really important issue of the spot in the brain MRI yet. Dr. Souweidane’s assistant came to get the CD with Eli’s MRI on it today so he could take a look. We are hopeful that means we will hear something tomorrow. If not, we’ll certainly be calling them (again) in the morning. We did get the official news that Eli is now HAMA positive. We were fully expecting that since he was over halfway there before his 9th round. For the newbies to Eli’s CarePage, HAMA stands for Human Anti-Mouse Antibody. Basically, it’s a measure of whether your body has become immune to the antibody treatment. Once you have HAMA, there is no point in continuing the treatment because it won’t do any good anymore. A score of 1,000 or more is HAMA positive and Eli’s score was 6,632. Since this new spot on the brain has come up, nobody is really talking about what that means for future treatment. One thing at a time. We are certainly thankful that we got 9 rounds in before going HAMA.
We did hear that his bone marrow biopsies came back clean, but the bone marrow aspirates are not in yet. So besides this new spot on the brain and the unknown status of the bone marrow aspirates, all of the other scans are clean. Eli was on an antibiotic for a cough he had earlier on which, combined with the fact that we are on the second week of his last round of Accutane, really did a number on his stomach. His diarrhea has been really bad and we took him in today to get his Electrolytes checked to see how his Potassium levels were. Sure enough, it was low and he had to get a 30 minute infusion of Potassium, which shot him up to the normal range. We will have to check them again on Friday just to be sure.
That’s about it for today. I know people are as anxious to hear something as we are, so I’ll keep updating whenever I find out something new. As always, thanks to everyone for the prayers!

By the way, this is the photo album that I am periodically updating any time I get a descent picture from this trip to NYC. Click the thumbnail below and keep checking that site to see if I’ve added anything else (the lower quality pics are from a phone with a camera, sometimes that’s all I have on me at the time!):

NYC