Today was Marye's appointment with Dr. Riley, her regular oncologist. We were hoping for some good news-- an aggressive treatment plan to finally address the tumor in her liver. Well, yesterday, Marye was feeling lousy all day: nausea, pain, etc. Today was no better. She hasn't eaten anything since Tuesday night. So at the doctor's office, her temperature was 101.9 and her heart rate was 110 bpm. Not as bad as when she had the infection last week, but close. In any event, it was enough for Dr. Riley to be concerned about, so she admitted Marye into U of L hospital to get it under control. The reason they do this is, if she has an infection that gets into her blood stream -sepsis- things can go downhill really fast, and only the hospital can deal with it.
More revelations (or more confusion, actually): Dr. Riley is not entirely convinced that her tumor is metastatic breast cancer. The initial CT scan report did say that it was possible, but that it looked more like our old friend cholangiocarcinoma. But the pathology report came back as being estrogen-receptor positive, an indication of breast cancer. But Dr. Riley says that bile-duct cancer can also be ERP, and it really doesn't look like breast cancer to her. Given that she is the first real medical oncologist we've seen that specializes in this, she's probably the best person to judge. Anyway, she wants to get a full-core biopsy (as opposed to the needle that was done at Clark), and she wants to check for HER2, which is subset of breast cancer. Neither of Marye's previous cancers were HER2 positive, but apparantly, the biology can change when it's metastatic.
So now that she's in the hospital, she can get her infection treated, (she's getting a CT scan right now), and they can do the biopsy on the tumor. Hopefully they can start some treatment on the actual cancer before too long. Again, while she's as weak as she is, she's not in any condition to start chemo.
Sorry for the bad news. I wish it was better. In fact, I wish that just once, I'd have some good news to post about this whole thing.
-Chris
