Last night, around 9:30pm, I talked to my mom and she gave me all the updates from Karl's doctors appointment yesterday. At 7:00am this morning when I woke up I realized that I forgot a majority of what she said. As the day has progressed I'm beginning to remember more and more, and I'm hoping that writing this blog will further jog my memory. My excuse, I was driving a Rabbi from Logan Airport (Boston) to Gordon College at 1am. Seriously. I'm not going to tell you what I do for a living. I'll let y'all's collective minds wander...
Ok, so Karl first met with the radiologist. He was a very nice man but it was decided that if Karl can receive the same treatments in Gurnee, IL there is no point in him driving to U of C. They said that this is in fact the case. Thus this meeting was very short. Karl will meet with a radiologist next week. During that initial meeting they will hopefully fit him for the "mask" he will have to wear during the treatments. The mask, as far as I understood, is to block the gamma rays (from Marvin the Martian's gun) from hitting the healthy spots of Karl's brain. The doctors proposed the mask pictured above. For the longest time we thought that it was problematic that Alan (Karl's older brother) collected comic books and "nerd" paraphernalia. How fortunate are we that Alan already has a Darth Vader mask! That should save us a couple hundred bucks!
I'm kidding by the way. Not that Alan has a Darth Vadar mask (and cape). He does. But Karl's mask and new helmet will probably look a little different. Oh yeah, and Karl is also getting a new helmet. That's not a joke. He is actually getting a new helmet.
Karl then met with his neurosurgeon and he was very pleased with how the wound was healing and he thought that Karl looked great. Good news obviously.
Then Karl met with his oncologist (i.e. Hans Gruber). To put in simple terms, Hans is awesome. My mom (I'm not quite sure how. Perhaps she used her ninja skills) was able to steal a glance at his schedule for the day. Apparently he set aside an hour to meet with Karl. That's pretty cool. These guys meet with like 46,000 people a day but he sat there and answered every single one of my family's questions. That's pretty cool.
So Karl's radiologist will be in Gurnee, but he will keep the same oncologist at U of C.
Lastly, the doctors mentioned again that in a lot of cases patients that come down with an infection actually have more successful radiation and chemo treatments. Apparently the infection works with the body to fight the cancer. Pretty wild. So, yes it stinks that Karl had to delay his treatments but at the end of the day it may actually turn out for the best.
One more word on Alan, it was his son that dressed up as Yoda for Halloween (consult Halloween posting on this blog). Are you noticing at theme emerging?
No comments:
Post a Comment