Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

After spending the week reading over medical journals on Hodgkin's treatments, I've decided to go with ABVD for my treatment. It was quite hard to make the decision based only on the affects of the treatment, because each negative seemed to have some positive that outweighed it. Going through the medical journal articles, I was able find some that compared the overall success of ABVD and Stanford V directly. Some of the earlier studies only showed that Stanford V was an effective treatment, but the later studies showed that Stanford V was not as effective as ABVD. Over all, rate of reoccurrence of disease seems to be higher with Stanford V, and the long term cure and survivability rates of ABVD are much higher.

The possibility of lung and heart damage still worries me, but I have found some information on the Nation Cancer Institute website about supplements that seem to make the heart and lungs resist damage while taking the drugs that cause it, so I will ask my doctor about that. I still have one more appointment at the UW hospital next tuesday (relating to Meg's concern of not having any little Aarons running around) so I will be starting my chemo next thursday. I've just called them up and let them know, so they will be arranging things and calling me in the next few days to get things set up. I kind of wish I could just start it today though. I'm not as impatient as I was before, but it'd still be nice to get it going.

So doing nothing this weekend. Maybe I'll be able to get my film developed. One is going to be hard. I'll either have to trick them into thinking it's regular film, convince them that developing this non-regular film will not cause their machines to blow up, or take it somewhere that understands ( and charges $20 per roll...)