Got treatment #3 done

We went in yesterday for the second try of treatment #3, the first treatment of the second cycle. His ANC was 440, above Dr. Koc's cutoff of 350, so he got the treatment yesterday. To get us back on a Friday schedule to help decrease missed school days, there will be 18 days instead of 14 before his next treatment, which will be on 2/4. The treatment went fine and we found out that the chemo nurse he had yesterday has a brother that lives in the same small town in rural Virginia that I grew up in-small world. He was feeling OK last night, but fairly nauseated this morning. He went to school though and it is mid-afternoon and he isn't home yet, so he must be doing OK. Either that, or he had an important patient whose appointment he didn't want to cancel. Nick is scheduled for his mid-treatment PET scan on 2/4. When we talked with Dr. Koc on Friday, he brought up a few possibilities for the rest of Nick's treatment. He said that if this PET scan is completely clear, we can talk about the possibility of doing only 4 cycles of chemo and no radiation. He's also talked about 4 cycles of chemo with involved field radiation and 6 cycles of chemo without radiation in the past, so it looks like there are 3 choices. After doing research on the long term side effects of the chemo and the radiation and the overall and event-free survival rates of combined modality therapy (chemo + radiation) and chemo alone, we are leaning towards no radiation, but we'll have to see what the midway scan shows and talk it over with the doctors. Only two months later, I am already realizing how naive the last sentence of the first entry of this journal was. I said, "Hopefully in a year or two, we'll be looking back on this time and saying, "Remember when..."" HA! I can already see how this will change things forever. I can only imagine the stress that post-treatment scans will bring, imagining that the scans will show relapse rather than the continued remission that we hope for. I know that any time Nick feels anything slightly odd, we'll panic about recurrence. At this point, I don't see how we can ever go back to normal life and not be paranoid about cancer. Being paranoid about cancer IS our normal life now.