Big Day for the Wilkins crew!

Last night Scotty went in for his regularly scheduled MRI- these two months seem to fly by extremely fast, it seems like he was just in for his last MRI.  Anyway, we went to follow up with the results today with the Oncologist.  Once again, Scotty had NO NEW GROWTH - and no progression! WOOOOHOOOOOO!!! We LOVE hearing those words!  Praise the Lord!

If you read Scott's last blog post, he mentioned that we were given the opportunity to stop the chemo trial that he was participating in.  At that time, we were caught completely off guard and did not want to make the decision to stop the Chemo.  It just seemed so scary to us.  But after much thought, we decided that it might not be a bad idea.  So today when we got the good news, we decided to review our options a little further.  We had a family meeting the other night, where we conjured up several questions and concerns that we wanted to address with the Dr.  So today, we went at him full force!  We spent over an hour talking to him and really getting deep down into Scott's situation.  Here's what we came up with.

Basically, Scott is doing EXTREMELY well!  He has not had any new growth or any progression in over 14 months of being on this trial of Avastin and Tarceva.  When the Doctors do not see any growth over a period of 12 months, they like to see the patient stop taking the Chemo- (there are several  reasons why they do this, but here were the deciding factors for us).  1. They like to see if the cancer has stopped growing on its own (maybe the chemo actually killed it) 2. The cancer can sometimes mutate and find a way around the Chemo and become resistant to the treatment.  These are the main reasons they like to stop treatment after a year.  Now of course, they do not know if in fact any of these things could be true of Scott's tumor or not, because EVERYONE and EVERY TUMOR is totally different!

So with this information in mind, we took the "lets quit while we are ahead" approach and decided to stop the Chemotherapy for now, while Scott has the opportunity, and he has not become resistant to these two regiments- if in the future this stinky tumor decides to grow back, we will still have the opportunity to take these again, and we like the idea of that!!

As we finished up in the Doctors office when the official decision was made, Dr. Yung said, "okay then, we will see you back in two months." We were like WHAT? two  months?? We didn't think about the fact that we won't have to go every TWO WEEKS and every MONTH for Dr.. appts!  HOW COOL is that?!  It was a very weird feeling to think that we are free of Doctors appointments, and blood tests, and IV pokes and hours of waiting for the Chemotherapy treatments! But its a very cool feeling at the same time!

Now we need to continue to pray for our sweet Scotty! We need to pray that this tumor decides that it is NOT going to come back and it will not progress!  We thank everyone for all of the prayers and prayer lists we have been added to, we have learned so much about our Faith in God throughout this entire process and we will continue to lean on him during this path that he has lead us on- its a rocky one, but we know there is a reason that we are walking it!

Love to you all!!!

Candace, Scott, and Tyler

P.S. Tomorrow 10/17/12 we celebrate 3 years of Marriage!  I can't believe its been 3 years already - our wedding feels like it was just yesterday - what a fun day that was!!!