Praise and Good news!

So we met with the Oncologist this morning and we got some things mixed up so Janet is not staring Chemo today like we had thought, she will start it next Tuesday. She is going in to have a port placed to have her chemo through this afternoon at 2:30. Please be praying that that goes smoothly and without a hitch!

The Oncologist was very optimistic. He told us that she does have stage three Ovarian Cancer (O.C. from here on out), and that isn't unusual because normally it isn't caught until stage three. The average age for O.C. is 61 and he said he would do a BRCA mutation test to see if it is genetic but that we may never know why she got it. He said that her "performance status is good and that she will have a good response rate" which basically means that since she is young and in good physical shape she will have a better response to the chemo than if she wasn't. The other good news is that is isn't GI cancer, because he said if it were, we would be in a much worse situation because of the way that it has spread. I guess it is normal for O.C. to spread through the abdomen, but that it is not good when it is other types of cancer that do that. So that is something else to be thankful for!

The plan for now is for her to have three rounds of chemo. The first round will be next Tuesday starting at 8:30 am. It will last around 5-6 hours. She will then wait three weeks before her next round and they will be checking blood levels in the mean time to make sure she is where they want her to be and that her body is responding correctly (checking that the CA 125 levels are dropping, which are currently 288 and should be less than 30). She will have surgery, hopefully, in 8-9 weeks and they will go in and "clean up" all of of the cancer. The doctor explained to us that by having the chemo first it will kill off some of the cancer cells and then when he goes in he can clean up the ones that were resistant to chemo.

We asked him about the prognosis and he said that O.C. has resistant clones to chemo, it is kind of stubborn, but he said there is a rule of 75s.

75% of the time it is caught in stage 3,
75% of that time the chemo gets it,
75% of that time there may be a relapse 10-15 years later.

Janet has really lost her appetite over the past few weeks and the doctor said that it is because of the O.C. and that she should be feeling much better after the second round of chemo (in a month or so). She will lose her hair sometime between the 1st and 2nd round of chemo, and that is not something that concerns her at all, she is just wanting to fight at this point! The two drugs that she will be given are Taxol and Carboplatin to start because they are the only ones proven to benefit O.C.

The biggest blessing is one of the last things that the doctor said to us...
That there is "no reason to not expect a complete response".

She is fighting, and she has a BIG God fighting on her side. We know that the battle is just beginning but we also know who has already won.

Thank you so much for the prayers, I will continue to update as we find more out!

--Jenna