NIH Summation

I had been wanting to figure out how much time we had spent at NIH over the last four years...so...last night when I was having trouble sleeping I went through my blogs and found all the dates, etc. of  Woody's out and in patient times at NIH.  We made 20 trips to NIH...18 driving and 2 flying. He spent a total of 63 days as either an inpatient or outpatient. Add to those 63 days 36 days on the road either getting to NIH or going home.  So a total of 99 days out of his daily life he gave for research.  He had 2 surgeries there and one time spent 24 consecutive days as an inpatient when he received chemo to almost destroy his immune system prior to receiving his TIL cells and IL-2.  During one of his inpatient stays he passed a kidney stone.  He had a total of 4 inpatient stays--2 for surgery, 1 when they gave him dye when they shouldn't have (that is the time that he passed the kidney stone), and then the long 24 day stay to go through the research protocol. He was a guinea pig for National research.  He was one of the success stories with this stage of this particular protocol.  Last week they did express gratitude and said that they had learned a lot from his time and loaning of his body for research. He has definitely beat a lot of odds as to life expectancy after being diagnosed with 4-stage melanoma. At this point it is has been 6 1/2 years since he first stepped foot in Dr. Sosman's office in Dec. 2008...not bad when I was told that he would probably live less than a year.  God's grace has followed Woody through all these procedures and we have faith that God will continue to grace Woody.

Now we will proceed on and see what is waiting in the wings for the next chapter for treatments.  Vanderbilt is right up there in research.  Dr. Sosman is the head of the Melanoma dept. at Vanderbilt and is known all over the country and world as a melanoma expert.  The Vanderbilt- Ingram Cancer Center is a part of the National Cancer Institute of NIH...so we are really still a part of NIH.  Yesterday we received a call from one of Dr. Sosman's nurses and today we received a "packet" of information...rather like first-time patient info.  We've already been there and done that!  That is one thing...we are heading back into familiar territory...at least location-wise.

Woody did our Saturday WalMart grocery shopping and went to the library this morning.  He walked six miles today.  I have spent a lot of hours sorting pictures...that time once again when I realize that I haven't done it in a long time and a lot are sitting there needing to be put in their proper place.