Just got home from celebratory dinner at Black Angus. Lauren of course had her lobster. It’s now a tradition after each successful MRI. We don’t want to take any chances and change anything.

We met with Dr. Finlay today. He appeared genuinely excited about the results of Lauren’s MRI, and not just trying to make us feel good. He said in his and the radiologist’s opinion, it appears the tumor has shrunk, a little. Also, prior to the MRI, they injected her with a contrast, that show chemical changes in the brain. Based on these signals, they are able to tell what the tumor is doing, if it’s dying, dead or growing. These signals are picked up by the MRI. Based on these signals from Lauren’s MRI, Dr. Finlay believes her tumor has been reduced from a high grade tumor (fast growing) to a low grade tumor (slow growing). He said so far, Lauren’s progress is exceeding his expectations. Now that the tumor is stable, the next step is to kill it. He also indicated that the protocol Lauren is on (remember Lauren is not in the clinical trial study) will not be available as a clinical trial until 2012. So Lauren is getting state of the art treatment.

We did run into a minor snag. In order to begin the next step there is a check list of tests that needed to be done (hearing, eye, kidneys, etc.). One of the tests was to have her teeth checked out and requiring the dentist to sign off that her teeth are healthy. However, since her two bottom teeth are loose, he won’t give his okay, which means we can’t proceed to the next phase. The fear is the teeth would fall out when her counts (platelets and white blood cells) are at their lowest, and we would not be able to stop the bleeding or she could get an infection. The only way he’ll sign off is if we extract the two front bottom teeth, which we are going to have done on Friday.