Happy Birthday!

Today is the fourth day of our 8th week of treatment. The treatment consisted of a modified fever week with three intense sessions of heated therapy (5 hours long each) and one long whole body hyperthermia. Layla's response has been great in terms of fever. Her fever spikes after treatment and stays high for few hours and eventually dies out at night. She will recover this weekend as she prepares for an actual original fever week that's similar to the one she did the second week of treatment.
So how do we spend our day? We are mostly at the clinic Monday through Friday and Layla typically has treatment ranging anywhere from 5 to 8 hours. The clinic is filled with hopeful patients with different kinds of cancer.  The diverse group of patients includes teenagers, young fathers and mothers as well grandparents. We share a lot of information and provide support for each other.
The tumor markers have come down a little bit and so have the liver enzymes. We are counting fully on the immune system to do the work.
Happy Birthday to Layla and Nina. We spent the weekend in the beautiful city of Budapest which is a little under three hours by train. It was cold and raining but the city was still full of tourists where Europeans were enjoying a three day weekend since Friday, November 1st was All Saint's day.  
With lots of hope from Vienna,
Team Layla

Cool Sculpture Outside Starbucks in Budapest



At Gerbeaud, Budapest

At one of the oldest cafes in Budapest

Buda Castle from the Pest side


Parliament Building

Shoes on the Danube Bank

The Danube at night


Back in Vienna picking up Birthday Dinner at the Station

Celebrating with Olaf (still in Halloween entire)

Comments

  1. UnknownNovember 28, 2019 at 5:04 AM

    Hey lovely girls, are you still in Vienna?! I would like to meet you here and exchange our experiences. Lots of love, Sanja

    ReplyDelete
  2. SamaraNovember 28, 2019 at 11:28 AM

    Hello Sanja,
    We left Vienna about 10 days ago. Feel free to message me

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

COMPLETE REMISSION!!!!!! (Update provided 8 months later)

Image
Our new pet outside our hotel room Update: We are thankful to our medical team , our complete remission lasted 6 months. We are continuing treatment with Doctors Kleef, Williams and Rosenberg.  Please refer to updated blogs! We are in disbelief. Four months ago, I broke the news to Layla about the scan results showing that the cancer was now in her liver with too many lesions to count. It was a miserable day with lots of tears and pain.  Layla looked at me and asked: "Does anybody ever come back from mets in liver?, I am not ready to die!". The odds are super slim. While we were all trying to come to terms with the new escalated level of the disease, Nina was already looking at all the options that she knew of and what was the best way to turn this nightmare into a blessing in disguise. With the metastatic disease now in her liver, Layla became a candidate for the OX40 Intra-Tumoral injection (Stanford Study) but needed treatment to shrink the extent of the...
Read more

One Last Update😢

Image
Although many of you probably already know the ending of our update, I feel it is important to explain how we got from normal treatment in Vienna to losing our Layla in three weeks, since you shared our journey. We left Vienna on Thursday, February 27 to Berkeley, California with the promise of a new treatment, Side Effect Free (SEF, pronounced 'safe') Chemo.  Due to several immune related adverse events and other challenges, we needed to pause immunotherapy for several months and we had been assessing SEF chemo as a non-immunotherapy backup plan should this ever happen. Our time in the San Francisco Bay Area was very short lived as Layla was getting very weak and was developing upper respiratory issues- with symptoms progressing significantly each day. She had developed Lymphangiosis carcinomatosa, a very rare form of metastasis from breast cancer that spreads to the pulmonary lymphatic system and eventually severely impacts the lungs. We also learned that the pulmonary...
Read more

Early Christmas Present!

Image
A Quiet Moment. I hope you all had some time to relax and enjoy the holidays. Our Thanksgiving was not traditional but still very nice. We missed our yearly get together with the rest of the family but were joined with Wes and my sister Cathy and nephew Dan. We celebrated Dan's 25th birthday. Layla had treatment Monday through Wednesday. Wes accompanied her and got to meet Dr. Rosenberg and the nursing crew. Our Thanksgiving consisted of a pre-ordered Whole Foods Turkey+ Meal along with some home made stuff. It was delicious!  We might have a new tradition from now on! We hung out mostly at home. Layla was exhausted, a side effect of both immunotherapy and chemotherapy. We had rented a house for 6 days to bridge the gap between our Mexico trip and our third phase of treatment. Happy Thanksgiving! Layla modeling her new outfit dubbed the "Huggle" (gift from Cathy). Olaf is not sure about the portions! Family Thanksgiving Selfie. On Saturday...
Read more