Allergies and Next Steps

Michelle was taken by ambulance to the Emergency Room last night with difficulty breathing. She's being admitted to work out a new pain management plan, as we believe she had an allergic reaction to a med we increased yesterday.

Yesterday we met Dr. Marschke, an oncologist here in Fort Collins. He is very concerned about Michelle's increasing level of pain and wants to be more aggressive in exploring treatment options. He increased the dosage of the Fentanyl patches, and we believe this triggered a severe allergic reaction.

Other developments: the ERCP scheduled for Wednesday (in Denver) is still on, but the SpyGlass tool is still in Japan for repair and won't be available until mid-January. We decided to proceed with an earlier generation tool which will still provide diagnostic value although it is not as fully optimized as SpyGlass.

We have an appointment with the CU Denver cancer team on Thursday. We will meet with each team member and then they get together to design a treatment plan and present it to us the same day. We plan to get a hotel room Wednesday after the ERCP to spend the night and avoid the 3 hour round trip.

Michelle is scheduled for a PET scan on Friday. This is a key cancer diagnostic where they create a 3 dimensional full-body image with CT scans to screen for any traces of cancer. With this scan plus Wednesday's procedure, we should have a better picture of the extent of the cancer.