4th Update: University of Miami's Sylvester Cancer Center

February 13, 2018

Mixed news kind of rough day. We were up at 6am to go down to UM for dad's surgery. His port placement procedure was this morning. He was out of surgery in about an hour & everything went well or so it seemed. More on that later. Because he can't eat and he's lost nearly 40lbs, he started chemotherapy the same day, today apparently, which was a big surprise to us as we were unprepared. He's staying 30+hrs until very late tomorrow night.

We met with his oncologist after the surgery and he ordered for the next month a pretreatment PET scan, CT scan, and I finally got them to do a bone scan, which he thought was a good idea. His blood work came back mostly good and he was ready to go. He is treating him in a curative manner with a goal of remission instead of life long palliative care. The goal is to do surgery if it's only regionally around his esophagus and after a few rounds/months of chemotherapy to switch to Keytruda immunotherapy.

They said he'll be able to eat sometime in between the 1st and 3rd treatments.

He chemotherapy treatments will be once a week, for 3 weeks on and 1 week off, he'll do the doses and then he'll get scanned after 2 month cycles. 

He'll normally go in early on Monday mornings and leave late Tuesday nights.

They told him to rinse his mouth with warm salt water before meals and to make sure to brush often with a soft toothbrush and use nonalcoholic mouthwash. They suggested he stays away from our pets and double flush the toilet. They said the FU5 makes hands and feet very dry, so they suggest loading up on lotion. And told him to remember the most important thing is to drink a gallon of water a day.

Now, back to the complications with his port and something isn't working properly. He seems to have such bad luck with surgeries lately. After a couple tries they had to do chemotherapy treatment through an arm vein IV now and they'll figure out what's wrong with the port tomorrow through a port study. He's in a lot of pain. We're still waiting for decisions to be made and more information to come.

Tough day full of ups and downs.