August 13, 2007

Today, we are very thankful and encouraged because we had a great meeting with the oncology team at Duke that specializes in retinoblastoma. They were very helpful, patient, and answered all of our thousands of questions.

We feel that God was with us today and is really leading us in our decision. For the last couple of days and even as of this morning, we both felt that the oncology team would have to give us some VERY strong reasons to do a chemotherapy treatment in order for us to change our mind. We were almost 99% certain that removing the eye was the safest, quickest, and most effective route. Today, we learned otherwise, and have made an almost complete turnaround.

We learned, contrary to what we understood over the past couple of weeks, that there is still a possibility that this is a hereditary disorder, even though we have had no instances occur in either of our families. In other words, the disorder might be inherited, but David is the only one in our family so far that has actually had cells mutate because of it. This is very important, because the hereditary form has a much higher probability of showing up in the other eye. The doctor also shared that there are were two pixels that showed up on the CT scan in his “healthy” eye that may or may not be mutating cells. This causes us to lean strongly towards the chemotherapy treatment, which will hopefully shrink/kill the existing tumor and also kill any other diseased cells that are too small for us to see at this point.

Although there are still risks to chemotherapy, the ones described to us were less than what we might have expected. However, with the other information we received today, we think we are leaning towards at least giving this a shot.

As always, David was a very good boy today. He talked and smiled and only cried a little when they drew blood for lab work. He also loaded some diapers and did some push ups on the exam table to further impress the doctors and nurses.

We are so thankful to everyone for their prayers and support and we really feel the Lord’s leading at this time. We are seeing that it is true that God gives wisdom generously to those who ask. David is an excellent little boy and God has an excellent plan for his life. We also want to thank everyone for praying for our courage and strength during this process. We don’t know how we have strength now, but we do, and it must be because of our Strong Tower. Please continue to pray as we make a final decision and we will keep you posted. Pray because God is listening!

-Rob