The weekend

Well, its been an interesting 24 hours. The last week Cleve has been feeling increasingly more pain and more fatigue, so we contacted our oncologist here and he set up an MRI which showed no new brain metastasis but a small lesion at L1 in the back. Yesterday Cleve went in for a spinal tap to check the pressure in his brain. The results showed that Cleves meninges are enlarged. While having Dr. Traul repack his wound, we had decided to make a trip into our oncologists office as well. It was thought at first that the lesion in L1 could be due to a drop down effect of cancer cells in his cerebral fluid but we would have to wait on the test results to confirm. Since Cleve has not been eating much or drinking and vomiting, he was very dehydrated so Dr. Poisson had Cleve admitted to the hospital last night. He has received non stop fluids along with some antibiotics and steroids to hopefully help Cleve get to feeling better. The results came in negative this morning for the cerebral fluid, so it has been decided that the swelling of the meninges is due to a too rapid of a taper off of his steroids in order to get ready for the ipilumimab treatment we were supposed to receive this week. So the plan is to increase steroids to get him feeling a little better and eating and drinking better and then come home. Then we will start a taper off of the steroids again, only going much slower. Steroids are a contraindication for the ipilumimab treatment, so at this point I'm not sure that we will be doing treatment this week or even next week. We will have to wait and see about starting any new treatments until he is feeling better. This is just a quick update and i will keep y'all posted on any changes to the plan. And don't worry, Cleve is getting some much needed rest and is doing fine.