MC's Blog

(Bridgette here) We met today with Dr. Bert O’Malley at Penn. He is the head of the Head and Neck Surgery Department at Penn. Tom, mom and I liked him a lot. He’s very direct yet positive. One really does feel in good hands sitting in front of him. In short, mom has one of three types of cancerous tumors. The kind that he thinks she has is called Sinonasal Undifferentiated Carcinoma (SNUC). The other two possibilities are olfactory neuroblastoma and malignant melanoma. Additional stains will be done on the biopsy sample that was taken last week to decipher what type she has. This process will take between a week and ten days. In the meantime, she has consults with Neurosurgery, Oncology, etc. and will also have a full body PET scan and an additional MRI of her neck. These consults will then be followed by team meetings will all experts involved to decide upon the course of treatment. Depending upon the type of cancer, either surgery or chemotherapy will come first. If the can...

Early morning December 12, MC woke up with an excruciating headache, one she likened to "having one's head crushed in a vice." After several hours and no relief, Tom took her to the ER at Paoli Hospital where she was admitted, given some heavy duty pain killers and sent for a CAT scan. The scan revealed a mass in her sinonasal cavity that is abutting her brain and creating pressure (hence, the headaches). By Thursday morning the steroids given to MC had reduced the swelling, and, mercifully, her pain. Mom being mom, she waltzed right out of that hospital in her usual sprightly fashion. To provide some context to this very sudden turn of events, MC had been experiencing a lot of sinus problems - colds, infections, allergies - this past year. Of course, these are all too common illnesses so it is to no ones surprise that MC was treated for run of the mill sinus infections particulary since she had no other symptons (we've since learned that most sinonasal cancer patient...