Birthday Celebration Week 1

Whew!! What a week. And just think, I have Birthday Celebration Week 2 starting in a few hours. I best get a little down time tonight with just los gatos, Lee and I. I anticipate a lot of purring from the poor neglected felines, poor kitties. 

Last weekend six old friends from Oregon flew down to help me celebrate. We had a great time touring the Kartchner Caverns, the top rated caverns by USA Today, and the Pima Air & Space Museum, the second largest display of aircraft in the country. Four of my friends left for soggy Oregon and we then explored Mac’s Indian Jewelry, Bisbee (an old mining town) and Tombstone with our remaining Oregon friends.

At the Pima Air & Space Museum my buddies and I held up the earth

We took time from our touring to laugh, reminisce, eat and drink. No ordinary wine crossed our lips. Two of my friends were former customers when I had a wine shop and they brought many legendary liquid treasures for us to share.  Unfortunately we couldn’t consume them all and they had to leave two bottles (a 1985 Vosne Romanee and a 2010 Big Table Farms Pinot).😆  Of all the gems we consumed the 1981 Ch Margaux and the 1977 Stag’s Leap Lot 23 Cabernet stood out to me. The Stag’s Leap bottle is famous because it beat top Bordeauxs at a blind tasting in France with French judges, a coming out party for American wine. It is also a sentimental favorite wine, it was the wine I selected to take the restaurant when I asked Little Lee to marry me.❤️

On my actual birthday we were joined by many friends for the cutting of the cake and other festivities. Many thanks to  Linda, Carlyn, Harmony and Marj for all their help in making the evening special.

A perfect salutation!

Get you hands off, this is MY slice of cake!!

Today we went to see radiation oncologist. You may recall from last week’s post that Dr. P thought that stereotactic  radiation might be an effective procedure to eliminate some of the larger tumors from my lungs. Unfortunately I am not a good candidate for this procedure. Even though this is very targeted radiation which protects the innocent tissue from collateral damage, there is scarring in the treated area. I have ten tumors of significant size in my lungs. To treat them all would result in too much scarring. To treat just the large ones does not make sense because there are still others that are growing. They normally only use this procedure after chemo has eliminated most tumors and they can fry 3 or 4 stubborn tumors 1 or 2 cm large. My larger tumors are twice that size, which is also problematic with regard to potential damage. In addition, the gnarly tumor is unfortunately positioned where they cannot use stereotactic treatment at all regardless of size, it would be too dangerous. Treatment would very likely severely impact my quality of life and might kill me. The doctor even said a new type of procedure called proton radiation which is more exact and controlled, wouldn’t work in my case. Below is a PET scan image the worst of my bunch of troublesome lung tumors.  Hint, bright red/orange indicate the level of activity.  Not good to see in tumors.

So, for now it’s continue on Lonsurf and hope it slows down the cancer, nuke the bad boy in my liver and continue to look for immunotherapy trials. Fortunately Marian, Lee’s mom,  gave me a prescription to deal with these issues which I am dutifully following right now.

Vino Rx with party flowers arranged by Harmony.

Birthday Celebration Week 2 is rapidly approaching. I have a public presentation based on my book to do tomorrow morning, sponsored by Arizona Oncology, and then we will meet four more friends flying down from Oregon in the evening. Rumor has it they are bringing some good Oregon Pinot Noir.🍷