Monday at radiation

Mistie has been taking a steroid to help control the swelling in her brain caused by the cancer as well as the radiation treatment. This steroid is awful. The side effects are that she has lost all mobility in her legs, only having the ability to pick them up a few inches, her face and limbs have swollen, and she is doing crazy things like trying to turn the TV off with her phone and asking nonsensical questions. Unfortunately all of these symptoms could also be due to swelling in the brain. So the dilemma was do we stop taking the steroid and risk increased swelling or do we continue taking the steroid and allow the side effects to continue to escalate. Her normal doctor was out of town last week and his replacement tried to increase the dose of the steroid as she felt it was likely the swelling that was causing side effects. It didn't make sense to us since these symptoms started long before we started the radiation and we have done this whole chemo thing before without any of these symptoms. After considering this we talked with our radiation oncologist and decided that instead of doubling her dose we would cut it in half and see how it effected her. I think it was the right decision as she is much more alert and her cognitive thinking has improved. Today we met again with the radiation oncologist and he was pleased with how improved she was and told us to discontinue the steroid. It will still take some time for her strength to be regained, but as long as she doesn't start experiencing headaches we are hopeful that she can start to feel better.