Certainly, not what we hoped to hear.
My brother has more lesions on his liver then he did last time they looked. Maybe the other cancerous sites, especially the colon and stomach, are ... improving. The images indicate that the mass in both places is basically the same size. Maybe it is scar tissue left behind from where cancer was thriving. They are not sure. Someone asked me why not biopsy those locations and ... I don't know. I don't know the whys or the why nots of any of this.
He is gaining weight. That's a positive. And ... as I said earlier, his voice sounds strong. In fact ... his voice has been mostly strong all along. He has a wonderful voice. All the men in my family are noted for sounding lovely. Sometimes, on the phone, I am lulled along, loosing focus on what he is saying, I'm soothed by the sound. I think he actually does that on purpose if that's even possible. He knows how to sound ... confident.
His chemo cocktail has been changed to focus on the liver with maintenance delivered to the rest of his ... places. Today he told me again that the doctor said ... this is the place where a lot of people give up, call it quits. You're still a very sick man. That's what he said, a bit of it. My brother said that he still has some fight left in him. Last week we had a bit of a scare. Tommy was experiencing pain which he thought might be clots. The radiologist didn't see any clots, but the pain didn't abate ... I could hear the extra pain meds thickening his tongue and blurring his thoughts. Today he told me that the doctor said the pain was from his liver.
Recently L was telling me some stuff about Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt may have been mis-served by the whole Teddy Bear thing because from what my husband was telling me I think I'm going to have to read up on Roosevelt for myself. L is watching Ken Burns' new doc The Roosevelts and was talking about Roosevelt's view on what a warrior is ... he (my husband) paraphrasing, said something like "it is easy enough to find people willing to kill for what they believe in, but a warrior is one who is willing to die for his beliefs." We remembered the fire-fighters walking up the flights of stairs on 9-11. We talked a bit about warriors. I have known a few.
My brother is a warrior. It's what he knows.
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