Progress Update

Well, here we are 17 months out from Shelly’s radiation treatment.  We have been through many ups and downs in that time.  But the bottom line is that there is no cancer and all of her scans have been clear.  We are very thankful for this.  Her vision however, has been reduced and there are signs that a cataract is forming.  One other thing is that the tumor, although significantly reduced in size, is beginning to leak lipids.  Too much leakage could result in furthur loss of vision.

On Oct 2nd, Shelly went to New York for a checkup.  I was unable to go.  This is when the doctor told her that she needed to have a laser surgery to control the leakage.  He also told her she had to have it immediately.  This really caught us off-guard.  Shelly had a difficult time dealing with this news. The doctor was a bit rude, probably caused by the fact that he had a cold, and it was the end of a friday.  The decision at that time was to come home and get a second opinion.  The doctor was quite upset at that point and told her,  ”…if you are going to refuse treatment, then you she don’t need to come back anymore!”  The following couple of weeks, it was decided that the laser procedure could be done by our opthamologist here in Syracuse.  Well….when we got there he told Shelly that he wasn’t confident enough to do the surgery and asked her to go back to NYC.  Dr. Finger is really the expert to do this surgery.  Disappointed, we went home and began making our plans for yet another trip to the city.

Not really wanting to go, we were back in Dr. Fingers office in mid-October.  He performed the procedure and said see you in a month! The visit was kind of surreal, in that, it was like Dr. Finger was a “new-man.”  He was funny and polite and….human.  You see up to this point we approached him like we were in the presence of greatness.  “All hail the specialist!”  Now that we saw him at a low point, it was different.  We had a wonderful conversation. He examined her eye and then asked Shelly if she wanted the surgery!  Wow, we were stunned.  Well needless to say, the answer was yes and it was done in less than 15 minutes.

Fast forward to today November 19th.  We are in the Bronx, NY. Preparing to go once more to Dr. Finger for a checkup.  Our prayer is that we see significant positive results and that we don’t have to come back here for awhile.

I’ll be trying to make a better effort to keep this blog more up to date….stay tuned…

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