Meeting Dr George

This is Steve. We had our first meeting this morning with Dr George at Duke. In addition to being a specialist in research and treatment of Kidney cancer, he really did a great job of being compassionate. We're blessed to have all of that in one doctor.

Karin only was able to sleep 3.5 hours last night, on top of not getting much sleep for several days now, and she had another panic attack on the way there (we had to pull into a parking lot so she could get out), and so she took some anti-anxiety medicine, which probably makes her even more tired. So she had a tough time keeping her eyes open while meeting with him. One great outcome of the meeting is that we're switching pain meds again (back to the oxycontin she was on before surgery, but at a higher dose), and have great hopes that the crazy side-effects we've been dealing with for 6 days will go away and she will be able to get much needed sleep! We've already started the transition and Karin was able to fall asleep quickly and is sleeping well! :-) I need to wake her up in a minute to give her pain pills. She's taking only short-acting ones every 3 hours for the rest of the day until we start the new long-acting meds tonight.

BTW, I haven't been getting nearly enough sleep for days either. I've often been up trying to help Karin get comfortable and calm to sleep. I cannot adequately describe it, but our nights lately have been very long frustrating ordeals.. but there are times Karin has woken up when I did not, especially Saturday night as I was so wiped out that I could not hardly get out of bed.

He spoke in a calming way, which was wonderful, but didn't help Karin's struggle to stay awake. I'm going to need to review the meeting with Karin when she gets some sleep and can keep focus. He talked about this cancer in general and it's appearance in our case. As we knew, this is a tough cancer to fight once it has spread, and our's appears aggressive based on the degree of spread. But treatment options are advancing rapidly in the last couple years. There is several treatments available, and it is good of course that Karin is young and has been in good health otherwise and her energy level has been good (prior to surgery).

He spoke to us about the potential of a clinical trial of a new combination of drugs that is showing better results than the drugs separately. We're going to try to get involved with that trial as the first attack on the cancer - to hit it hard right from the start. But we'll need to wait a couple weeks before any treatment (trial or not), to recover more from surgery and radiation fatigue. We're going to meet with him again next Monday to check on status and talk further.

There was more said than I can capture well - It was at least an hour with him, and that was after info was gathered by another doctor first. There was a fair amount of technical info about treatment options, all of which I've already read a lot about and will likely give more info on in the future.