Show Stopper...

Looooooooooong day at Vanderbilt. We left the house at 8am and we didn't set foot back in our house till 7:30pm. Woody checked into the Vandy clinic at 10am...we got there early so we could get the labs done and have the results by the time we saw Dr. Sosman. We definitely gave them enough time to have results there as we didn't even get called into Dr. Sosman's office till 30 min. after the scheduled appointment time and then it took quite a while for him to come in and we were in his office for a loooooooooong time and then Woody still had to go for his Zometa treatment. We were put in an exam room at 1:45 and didn't leave the exam room till 4:30...which was 2 hours after we were supposed to go to the infusion lab for Zometa. (And, we weren't seeing medical personal for all that time...a lot of the time was down time.) The Zometa treatment went like clock work and we were out in time to merge into Nashville's rush hour traffic.

Bottom line: Woody's melanoma "spots" had grown enough that he won't be continuing on the drug study. Dr. Sosman thinks that Woody had gotten all the "good" that he was going to get out of the drugs that he had been taking. Dr. Sosman told us today that he didn't know for sure...but he didn't think that Woody was getting any of the unknown drug since his counts hadn't done what others' counts had done on the study. He felt that Woody was just getting the Temodar and that it was time to stop the drug study. Then he put a lot of things out on the table. I won't go into any of them tonight as we still don't know what we are going to do. There is a drug study that we might be interested in trying so the research nurse (a new nurse for us) is looking into whether Woody qualifies to participate in it. She is supposed to call in the next day or so to tell us if we need to consider it. We came home with the papers to sign if he is eligible and if he really wants to choose this route.

So it's time to turn another page in the book for Woody's melanoma treatments. Woody was quite pleased not to be handed a new bag of chemo pills! So for the moment...a respite from treatments...till the next path is chosen.