Update on Helen's cancer

First I must thank all of you who have written encouraging messages.
I will write replies to all of you, very soon.

After Carl died me and Helen went to Ficksburg to see Helens parents for a week, and then we came back here to Durban. It took us just a few minutes to gather up all baby-related things and put in the nursery and then we closed the door.
Since then we have enjoyed having just ourselves to care for, building up a routine. I am working as usual for getmein.com and Helen is mostly resting.
We have of course a lot of thoughts about what happened, and I will write more about those later.

Last week Helen had a brain and spine MRI, and we have now seen both the neuro-surgeon and the oncologist.
The results of Helen's scan were mainly good. The small tumour seems to be completely inactive (or maybe not a tumour at all), and the larger tumour has shrunk a little bit since the last scan two months ago. But the tumour is situated in a location in the brain which makes it difficult to operate on Helen without great risk of causing other problems. So the surgeon does not want to operate unless the situation gets more critical.
Another problem is that the tumour is not displaying the precise characteristics of the type of cancer that Helen had seven years ago, so now the doctors are speculating that it might be another type of cancer (which could be both worse and better), but it makes the planning of the treatment more difficult. And they can't know for sure, unless they get a sample, but as said before, just getting that sample is associated with a great risk of damaging some part of the brain.

The doctor said this about Helens chances:
If there are 10 people in Helens position, then
-1 of them will die within a year
-at least 5 of them will die within 5 years
-only 1 of them will live longer than 10 years.

On the bright side, this is the same prognosis that they gave Helen seven years ago, except they said only one in ten would live longer than five years :)

The way the tumour would kill Helen would be if it stopped responding to treatments, and just continued to grow and the doctors were unable to stop it. So far this tumour has responded very well to chemo-therapy, so that is an encouraging sign.

So the treatment plan now is that on Monday Helen will start another round of chemo-therapy, and three weeks later she will have another round, and three weeks after that they will commence a five week radiation treatment, that will last until early December.
We had planned to go away on some holiday to get some distance, but now there will not be much time for that, plus the fact that the chemo-therapy will lower Helens immune system, and then perhaps travelling in these swine-flu times is not a good idea.
But it is still our plan to try and spend Christmas in Sweden.