Chemo is Over!

I finished my last round of Temodar in May. I'm now a little over a month beyond my last chemo treatment and feeling really good. I'm running regularly, my hair has filled in pretty well, I'm working as full time as ever, and I'm enjoying summer once again.

I went to a Brain Tumor Society sponsored conference in New York last weekend and learned more about the present and future of treatment. It seems like targeted treatments (tumor-specific chemotherapy that target specific receptors in the tumor) are slowly seeping in to brain tumor treatment, but that surgery, radiation, and Temodar are still the best western medicine has to offer.

I found an interesting statistic that I'm trying to get more information on. Dr. Rose Lai, an epidemiologist from Columbia Univserity spoke briefly on the causes of brain tumors and mentioned that 17% of Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia (ALL) patients that received full brain radiation were later diagnosed with some sort of glioma. This seems like a very high number to me, so I want to find out about the data behind it. I'm also interested in meeting some of the other people out there in a similar situation.