Blizzard Changes Chemo Schedule - February 10, 2010

Pete and I drove up for his scheduled appointment to resume his chemo treatments that had been put on hold but we were both wondering what to expect because of the dire weather prediction for another blizzard. We had just come through one that lasted all day Saturday into Sunday and covered us with about 20 inches.

We began by meeting with Dr. W, who gave us the disappointing but somewhat expected report of the CT scan that showed there are new lesions on his lungs and existing lesions have increased in size. I was hoping that nothing would have changed, but since the chemo schedule had been so disrupted, it was not surprising to hear the report.

Because this treatment requires 3 consecutive days of 7 hr long infusions each day we were faced with the following options: 1) go ahead and begin day 1 and then report to one of the hospitals for day 2, as the oncologist's office was anticipating closing due to the weather, and then figure out where to go, office or hospital, for day 3 depending on what that day's weather dictated; 2) reschedule all 3 days.

The weather forecast was so bad Pete chose to hold off and resume chemo next week, and it looks like he made a very wise decision. The storm right along the coast where we live had begun as a wet mix, changed to snow (accumulations of about 5 to 6 inches when I got up this morning), then back to a wet mix since about 8 AM. Away from the coast it's been all snow, but the weather reports continue to predict falling temps everywhere, including the coastal areas, with snowfall and wind increasing through tonight with snow totals of a foot or more for us by the time the storm moves out around midnight.

Schools are closed, officials are telling people to stay home, our governor has declared it a state of emergency. All this and we're still trying to recover from the last blizzard that dumped about 20" of snow on us on Saturday.