Staging Results!

We have been absent from our family blog for one month exactly as our son Thomas was diagnosed with cancer. We were publishing over at CaringBridge (https://www.caringbridge.org/visit/thomaslauer/), but are now going to try to bring the two together seamlessly in order to continue the family blog I have written for 14 years. This blog post is copied from CaringBridge and is being published retroactively. Please subscribe to our family blog to receive updates as I publish!

The results are in (both late and early!)! Thomas's GanglioNeuroblastoma is Intermediate Risk (Stage 3), not High-Risk (Stage 4)!

This is the news so many hundreds of people (maybe thousands) have been hoping, sacrificing, and praying for! This is good news!

The latest we had been told is that we would not be given this news until Thursday morning, so hearing on Tuesday afternoon came out of the clear blue sky. In fact, we learned the news while we had another family over for a BBQ meal and play date--socializing before chemo would prevent it--and it turned into a joyous celebration.

Thomas (and Mama) will check in to the hospital on Thursday morning for the first 21-day cycle of chemotherapy, which will begin with 4 days in the hospital. We will learn all the details of his treatment plan that morning, but the broad strokes are fairly straightforward:

• Two 21-day cycles of chemotherapy. Each one begins with an admission in the hospital.
• Each week, Thomas will have one day at the clinic having his ANC numbers checked to see how his immune system is functioning.
• On days 8-11 of each chemotherapy cycle, he will have "no functioning immune system," so he will have to stay home for safety and generally our whole family will stay close to home.
• During other days of each cycle, if his ANC is above 500, he can go outside and socialize with certain strict precautions. (I see online that normal ANC is 1,500-8,000.)
• If Thomas catches any kind of bug and gets a fever, he will have to check into the hospital overnight for antibiotics.
• After two cycles of chemotherapy, the doctor will check how well the tumor is shrinking (with an MIBG scan?). Most patients require two more cycles of chemotherapy.
• After the fourth cycle of chemotherapy, the doctor will check on the tumor again (with an MIBG scan?).
• If it has disentangled enough from the major abdominal arteries, then the surgeon can do surgery to remove the remainder of the tumor. 
• Often that is enough, although sometimes some residual chemotherapy is required after the surgery.
• In theory, this plan would take us through October.

We have tried to remain quiet about the treatment that would have been involved with Stage 4 treatment because it would last 18 months, include horrific medications, and include permanent side effects such as losing his fertility for life. We have lived under Damocles sword these last weeks. The survival rate of Stage 4 is half that of Stage 3. The recurrence rate of cancer after Stage 4 is exponentially higher. Like walking past a graveyard, I do not even want to speak in more detail of Stage 4 now.

We rejoice in this moment and thank everyone for prayers. We pray that our faith would have withstood a Stage 4 diagnosis such that we would still have said, "God is good all the time." 

Thomas and our family still has an arduous road ahead of us but our family moves forward with gratefulness.  As we said at the beginning of this journey, we are all creatures in that we are created by God.  Thomas is a creature, as too is this tumor.  The cells of this tumor have no choice but to obey God's will.  Our prayer has always been that God would command this tumor for His glory no matter the outcome.  So in this news we give Glory to Almighty God, who is the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords.  Te Deum Laudamus!