Vince's Journey

Wow. What an emotional couple of days. Thanks to everyone for all of your love and support. We are so blessed. For some of you who have not heard, Vince was diagnosed yesterday with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. He had a lymph node removed from his neck last week and we got the pathology results yesterday.

Today we got in to see two exceptional doctors, Bill Barrett of the Barrett Cancer Center at University and Dr. Leming, oncologist. We will both sleep a little better tonight now that we know what we are facing. Here is the best tidbit without getting into the medical side yet: Dr. Leming said to go home and tell our kids that Vince has a good kind of Lymphoma (if there is such a thing) meaning that it is slow-growing and can be treated.

Here’s the medical scoop. He has Follicular lymphoma – a disorder of the immune system. It is a low-grade or indolent form. His is a grade 1 which is the lowest level of malignancy. It is treatable though not curable (yet.) He said he could treat Vince immediately with some different types of drugs and it would wipe him clean for awhile but it would come back. So instead, over the next few weeks he will go through a bunch of testing – pet scan, bone marrow, blood work – and the doc will stage him or get a baseline on everything. He said this might be a 3 week methodical process. He ensured us there is absolutely no reason to rush. Then he wants to look into getting Vince into a clinical study for a new treatment for follicular lymphoma. He was very excited about some of the research going on and felt that we should take advantage of the newest thinking which revolves around creating a vaccine (We were a little foggy on this but I’m sure we’ll learn more.) He mentioned studies at OSU under John Byrd and at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, MD. He is going to have a very enthusiastic patient with the same lymphoma that participated in one of the studies at the National Cancer Institute call Vince which should help us understand more.

Vince is healthy and strong, showing no symptoms of the disease. Dr. Leming said the research groups will be clamoring to get him into their studies. Even said we could probably sell him on the Internet (I’m looking into it.) Overall, we feel somewhat relieved knowing we aren’t in an emergency situation and we feel like we are in excellent hands with Dr. Leming and his staff.

If you want to learn more, go to www.plwc.org for “accurate, reliable, and oncologist-approved information.”

Again, we feel so much love and support. We tried to include as many emails as possible but please pass this along. Vince might write a blog to keep you up-to-date as we progress through this.

God Bless,
Julie and Vince