Monday, January 19, 2009

So much for Good News

We had an appointment with the Infusion room at 8:00 this morning, but decided to call before we went in, since if they didn't have the biopsy results at 4:00 on Friday we doubted they would have the results at 8:00 on monday.  Mom spoke to the Nurse Manager who told us we would have to have the results by 10:00 if we wanted to get the infusion today since it takes ~ 8 hours.  So we called Fox Chase and Doctor called us back around 10:30.  She told us that pathology did not yet have the results, they weren't happy with the staining and were going to repeat it, also when I talked to the doctor she told me there weren't enough cells which were causing some problems as well.  In the defense of the pathologists I've been looking at the staining and they are very complicated and time consuming stains.  However, even though the pathologists couldn't give us definite results it seems very likely that the diagnosis will be Large Cell Neuroendocrine Carcinoma (LCNEC).  LCNEC is very similar to the small cell lung diagnosis because both are neuroendocrine tumors; and the treatment will be basically the same thing, however the prognosis is slightly better.  The doctor wanted to wait until we had definite results before we started the next round of chemo and wanted to push it back until Wednesday, which we informed her that it wasn't pushing it back 1 day but rather 10 days from when our next treatment was supposed to be.  So we got her to consult with another oncologist and they decided to let us start treatment tomorrow even though the pathologists won't have the results by then.  Nora's C-section is scheduled for Wednesday morning and we were hoping to go to see the baby, but if we had 8 hours of Chemo infusions that would be impossible but now we'll just have the 1.5 hour morning session and have the afternoon free to see the new baby.  So tomorrow morning at 7:15 we'll start round two of chemo.  We should really go buy a lottery ticket though because statistically unlikely events keep occuring LCNEC is even rarer then small cell with 10% of neuroendocrine carcinomas and <1% of all lung cancers; plus there is a 26% chance of snow and it is snowing like crazy!