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Showing posts from August, 2022

James has Wilms' Tumors (Update 3)

On our last update we shared that James was going to have a biopsy to learn more about the kidney tumors and try to understand why the tumor on the right kidney did not shrink as much as expected. The doctors wanted to rule out a possibility that the tumor cells were a particularly aggressive and chemotherapy-resistant type they called anaplasia cells. If the biopsy had revealed that the tumor had those cells, the doctors would have needed to ramp up the chemotherapy treatments for James to something much more aggressive (basically the highest James could tolerate). Great news was that they did not find this type of cancer tissue, but instead learned that James had some other rare cancer tissue that had matured to be more like muscle tissue that isn't dividing rapidly. This understanding helped explain why the right kidney tumor did not shrink as much as expected. The doctors told us that the tumor would not shrink much more from the next round of chemo and the surgeon will be able...