Tuesday, November 4, 2008

International Neuroblastoma Vaccine Star

Good morning - 2 days in a row! Yesterday was a truly great day. The kiddos were back into the swing of things. As much as I miss having them around during the week, it was a good thing. I was wall-to-wall busy. I just have 101 little to do items that keep piling up and I finally just had to sit down and concentrate on getting them out the door. You name it. It was everything from shipping cookbooks to reviewing marketing meterials. It was a complete day. I guess I had good karma from working so hard on my "should-have-done" list because yesterday I finally heard back from Dr. Eames. For the record, I was right. She was out of the office all week - something about saving kids lives on the floor. She even spent part of her time out of town. She felt really badly about not contacting us sooner but we completely understand. Had we thought it was something that required immediate action we would have found a way to get a hold of her. We were content - a little anxious - but content. I guess the most important thing was that we got answers. It turns out that Dr. Eames is in the same line of thinking as ourselves. We will send Sydney's blood off soon and we will coordinate it with a bone marrow biopsy and aspiration. We are running out of days this week because labs have to arrive at TXCCC before Thursday on any given week. I am guessing that it will be scheduled on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday of next week. Get ready! It will be an extremely nail-biting time.

I mentioned yesterday that there was an article on Sydney's vaccine trial that had just been published. Yes, it is making its rounds internationally. It is all over Google. There is a great, simple, and to the point version of the article here:
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jbP9-SE3RPXhkOKBT-LQ9vOH3WCQ
For those of you that are interested, I also have a PDF of the actual journal article itself. It is a very technical read but very interesting. Sydney is patient 9 on this study and you can actually see her in a chart. Of course, it does not mention her by name but it is very clear which patient she is. I also find it very interesting to see in the article how excited they are that they have been able to identify the vaccine so far out - 18 months!?! This is obviously one of the reasons that they are so excited about Sydney results. Perhaps we can help ask the question - why?

Well, I am off. This is Lunch for Life Cookbook day. I have to get everything off to the printer - only 99 more todos left.

Off to purposeville.

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