Update on Rochelle's CLL

Hi praying friends,
Okay, we have had 2 doctor appointments this week for Rochelle. The first one was to get a second opinion about her CLL status and the need to start chemo now, as well as read over her bone marrow biopsy. The doctor was part of MD Anderson Orlando, the second largest after the well respected Houston area Cancer Institute, and they did a very nice job of professionally and personally talking over the whole treatment, prognosis and expectations. In the end, they completely agreed with our original cancer doctor that now is the time to start chemo for CLL. They agreed on the chemical combination and the treatment schedules. Confirmed the hair loss (oh yes, I’m sure you will) and the benefits of getting a port put in.
So Friday, yesterday we met with our original cancer doctor and agreed on moving forward. So this coming week Rochelle will be getting a port surgically implanted, and a CAT scan will be arranged to picture all her body’s lymph nodes and show how swollen with lymphocites (white cells) they are, as a base line for what happens through the treatment (they should go down and be much less swollen by the end). The week after that she will be going in to our Cancer Institute of Florida (at the Florida Hospital East Orlando) for outpatient IVs of the chemo for 3 days. She will have one cycle each 28 days, 3 days of chemo and 25 of recovery, and 6 cycles of the chemo, so it will take nearly 6 months.
We so appreciate your prayers for us in all this! We’ve set up a Caring Bridge site to help keep you updated, so please sign up there for more prayer updates. Otherwise, I’ll limit what I include in these prayer updates. Here is the link: http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/rochelleclark
Thanks so much!
Steve and Rochelle