I would have never dreamed that I would complete 13 years of blogging and actually be starting my 14th year! I started it to keep folk up to date on Woody's initial treatments at Vanderbilt...an easier way to keep family and friends in the know and not have to make individual calls or send individual emails while he was in the hospital. The biggest miracle in writing this 4,349th post tonight is that I still have Woody to write about! From the initial diagnosis of 4th-stage melanoma, the prognosis wasn't very good and most medical professionals gave him less than a year to live. I will say that his diagnosis was at the cusp of lots of new melanoma treatments...and the fact that Woody was willing to play guinea pig, he was able to ride the wave through till he could be treated with the more effective ones. Many of the treatments that he went through are no longer given...which is a good thing for those facing a melanoma diagnosis/treatments today! IL-2 was the worst of the worst and he went through that three different times...twice at Vanderbilt and once at The National Institutes of Health (The NIH). The reason that he got to go to The NIH is that IL-2 didn't work for him at Vandy. The NIH had a study for those it had failed on to try IL-2 in combination with using their own TIL cells. That did work for Woody for a while...but when it stopped working and the melanoma showed back up, he was sent back to Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt at that point had something else for him to try, plus had something in the wings to try if that failed. What was in the wings was Keytruda. That put him in remission up until a year ago when a melanoma place popped up on his arm. That place was removed surgically, but poped up again close to where it was surgically removed. And, that is the latest that he is dealing with 14 years after being initially treated at Vanderbilt. The story really goes back much farther...but I will just deal tonight with his story for the length of my blogging time! The second or third blog goes into more detail, if you want to look back. At a point...I think that it was when things were calmer for a time, I started posting my photos with each blog...I got my first interchangeable lens camera a few months into Woody starting at Vanderbilt...so my photography story parallels his melanoma story...guess you could say they go hand in hand! I stand in amazement that some of you have been reading this since the beginning and have hung in there with me/us all this time! And, as long as we continue on this melanoma highway, I will continue to journal that ride here...as long as I am able and can find the words! Be safe! Be well! Be cautious!
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