One more radiation session to go!

Had my second to the last radiation treatment this morning (#29 of 30) with the last one scheduled for first thing Monday morning!  Pretty much cooked the hair off both sides of my head so I look like a muppet or a character from Sesame Street.  Some of my VEHS students think I should just run with it and get a mohawk (perhaps dyed chartreuse?). In any case, once the radiation is complete I will have roughly one month off before beginning more intensive chemotherapy for several months -- sounds like that can be rather unpleasant.

Also received news about my MGMT type -- not exactly what I was hoping to hear (I'll just quote Dr. McNichol's from the NeuroOncology Branch):

"We finally got your MGMT back today.  You tumor is negative for MGMT methylation.  We should talk in more detail about what that means when we see you in a few weeks. (Note: Lenore and I will be returning to Bethesda for another visit in early December at which time they will do a post-radiation MRI to assess effectiveness of treatment so far.) The short story is that it means the tumor is more likely to be resistant to Temodar than if the promoter was methylated.  It is by no means a 1:1 correlation, and we have many patients whose tumors respond nicely to Temodar despite being negative for MGMT methylation.  It is important to know about however, because we can sometimes overcome that resistance by using a different dosing schedule for the Temodar, so that might be something to think about in the future.  It doesn’t affect how we give the Temodar initially during the radiation (where we are using the Temodar as a “radiation sensitizer”), so it’s not something we have to act on immediately."

I was really disappointed by this news so I decided to do the most life-affirming thing I could think of and last Saturday I got my garden cleaned up and ready for next spring's planting. /dps