Not a Silly Thing :(

For those of you who don't know, my little brother has cancer. Below is a copy of much of the first email update we sent out about his condition:

"Thankfully, we actually have fairly good news! Brent's prognoses just came back this afternoon (several days before they thought it would) and was encouraging. While he does in fact have cancer, it is not as bad as they thought it would be! He still has several legions in his lungs and a large mass in his "belly" (abdomenal, I believe), they are very hopeful that they should all be able to be taken care of with 4 rounds of chemotherapy, all about 3 weeks apart from each other. The mass will probably not be totally destroyed, but hopefully it will be killed and even shrunk by the chemo and will then be able to be removed by surgery. Each time he gets a dose he will be in the hospital for a few days and he will need to be here for probably another week or so, but other than that he should be home most of the time. He can even go to school - when he feels up to it :)

The name of this cancer is Choriocarcinoma, but they said the best way to get GOOD information on it is to go to www.curesearch.org and look up germ cell tumors. Choriocarcinoma won't be on there specifically, so don't try :)

So, with a little luck and a lot of prayers, he could possibly be through with most of this in the next 6 months! Of course, complications and delays can always occur, and if the first 4 treatments don't do the whole job, he might need a few more, with a stronger dose of chemo. But for now, things are looking much better than they were a few days ago! This is STILL going to be a long, hard journey with a lot of ups and downs, I'm sure. Thankfully, his chances are very good and the survival rate is high. This is really the best thing the doctors could have hoped for. It's a little morbid and ironic that you can be happy with a diagnosis of cancer, but since we already knew it was SOME form of cancer, we're just very excited that it is THIS type of cancer, where there is a prodical and a plan to follow, instead of what they initially thought it could be!"

Since this time he has started the first round of chemo and so far so good. If you would like to get email updates on his condition, please send an email to project.lemtron@gmail.com .