Our last Blog update was made the day before Bill started taking the targeted cancer drugs. He was still taking large amounts of Advil. The lump on his leg was really big and ugly looking. He has now been taking the cancer drugs every morning and evening for 38 days. The lump on his leg is almost non-existent and while it is still red in some spots it is no longer angry looking. Oh, and the Advil supply in our house is lasting a whole lot longer now. A couple of weeks into the treatment he asked the doctor how he would know it was working. She told him he will suddenly realize that he hadn't taken any Advil for a while. She was right – one day he just stopped taking it. No pain is a very good thing.

Of course you would expect drugs like that to have side effects. We are armed with pages of things to look for but luckily we haven’t seen too many of them. The other night Bill did have a high fever which is not a good thing but that seems to have gone away too. There is definitely not as much energy in this house as there has been before but maybe it’s got something to do with the impending winter. We have not had to deal with winter since 2011. We've been in the islands for the past two winters. We are realizing that we didn't miss it at all. Unlike our daughter who lives on the Pennsylvania/Maryland border we have not had any snow on the ground yet this year. We aren't sure we are in a hurry to see that again.

One plus of being home is that we can celebrate all the holidays with our family. We skipped Christmas completely last year and didn't do much to celebrate it the year before. We resisted buying a Christmas tree this year but our kids pushed for it so we relented. As is our custom, though, we made them come over to decorate it for us. We think it looks great and it will be nice to look at it for the next month. Then I will be even happier to get it out of the house!

Nothing should be changing on the health front until January. That is when Bill gets his next CT scan and we’ll see what is happening inside his chest. We hope it shows that the larger lung tumor has shrunk just as much as the one on his leg. Also, it would be really good news if the tiny nodules had not changed at all. That would likely mean that they weren't cancer at all. Then surgical removal of all the cancer in his body (leg and lung) would be a possibility. Even though the targeted drug therapy is working wonderfully, the drugs stop working after an average of nine months. We will see the Oncologist at Johns Hopkins the first week in January to decide if we continue the drugs or switch to an immunotherapy drug. It’s possible he will still have the leg and lung surgeries, but it’s just as possible that he won’t have any surgery at all. For now though we are just hanging out, feeling sad we aren't cruising but planning to get back out there next year.