YAO-ZA!!!

Hey all,

Good news from Dr. Yao--or rather, Dr. Tiffany Avery, our new favorite doctor on the PLANET. Dr. Avery is running Yao's interference, we guess. She's on a fellowship at MDA and she came in before him to give us the run down on everything.

She said mom's labs were "perfect" (perfect!) and that the radiology reports were "stable overall" showing maybe only "1 or 2 millimeters" growth since January. When she percieved our slight discomfort with what felt like a somewhat ambiguous report, she says, "Do you want to see it?"

WHAT?

This is the moment when today became our coolest visit to date. Dr. Avery pulled up mom's scans, one from today, and one from August. She clicked through them and showed us mom's INSIDES, from her lungs down to her colon, pausing on the liver and demonstrating how they measure the tumors. Sure enough those pesky spots were still there, but we also got to see how much healthy liver mom has, which was (in my humble opinion) a reassuring blessing. Dr. Avery says, "Overall I think you're doing great."

Enter Dr. Yao, who becomes more friendly every time we meet. Here are the highlights of the notes I made: "Everything essentially looks good," "I don't see any significant change since January," and "Since you don't have any new symptoms, we don't need to scan as frequently." Now that we've completed a full year's worth of measurements, we get to scale it back. And with that, we were given six whole months until our next visit! (Notice how I use "we" like Carrie, Dad and I do anything at all.)

So that's the news from the highway between MDA and the airport. Carrie and I fly out in about an hour, and Kim and Dicky will hit the road. Pray for all of our safe travels, if you will, and praise praise praise the Lord for no significant growth!