Early Christmas Present!

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, we had a lot of help moving into our new place (home for the next 4 weeks). We are staying at a Wyndham timeshare resort in Pompano Beach till December 20th. The apartment was generously donated by Nikki (Layla and Derek's friend) and her mom. In addition to this very generous donation, Nikki and Gilbert are providing temporary loving home for Lucy, Nina's cat, while we are away for treatment.

Unpacking for our third move.

The view from our new place.

We received great news on Monday and even better ones on Tuesday. Remember those tumor markers we are tracking, well they are dramatically down again and it's definitely due to the combination of all the therapies that we are pushing. We cannot know what exactly is causing this, but we might even be seeing an early response due to the immunotherapy.

Date                     CA 125       Ca 27.29        Ca 15-3

10/15/18             1767            1511               821

10/29/18              898              1636             968     (following 2 weeks of treatment)

11/8/18                245              742                498     (following 4 weeks of treatment)

11/19/18               89               389                192     (following the immunotherapy procedure)

 % Drop               95%            74%                77%   (% Change from start of treatment)

The CTC (circulating tumor cell count), a marker that measures the amount of cancer cells circulating in the blood came down from 353 to 1!!! This is a remarkable drop in just 5 weeks!  We were stunned when we got the results and couldn't believe it.

Additionally, the ceruloplasmin (amount of copper in the blood) is down from 47 to 15 which is at the high end of the desired therapeutic range.  Dr. Rosenberg has never seen such a quick drop in numbers and he got very emotional with tears in his eyes when he was delivering the news. This is definitely due to the multi cut approach of the treatment including the low dose chemo, the re-purposed drugs, the tetrathiomolybdate (TM) which chelates excess copper, the recent intra-tumoral injection of OX40, CpG and Yervoy in Mexico City and all the previous immunotherapy work that was done in Vienna. 

The tumor markers need to be less than 30 to be in therapeutic range and we believe we are heading that way!! We celebrated the news by going to the movies. We watched "Bohemian Rhapsody". For all of the Queen fan, this is a great movie to watch in the theater.

We are getting ready for the holidays. We got ourselves a small xmas tree and got some decorations from the dollar store. 

Olaf approving our Xmas tree.

At the Dollar Store.

Our temporary home.

We hope to give you more good news next week as we will have a new reading of the tumor markers following two more weeks of treatment.

With lots of love,

Nina, Layla, Samara and Olaf too!