Dear YOU,

I would talk about this last week as feeling like a Yo Yo. Up, down, up, down, down, down...............

I left you last in the Zachary Update Story that he was going to have a biopsy. Now when I think of a biopsy I think of a small-outpatient-almost-nothing procedure. WRONG. Dr. Jessup in Bloomington cut about a four-ish inch deep cut in his right bottom region of his abdomen and he was in the hospital for 2.5 days. Dr. Jessup got three very good 'samples' and they sent them off to the Mayo clinic and to Bloomington Hospital. Many well meaning health care providers have told Zachary to get up and move around. He is quite sure that THEY have never had abdominal surgery!

The other part of the story I left you with was that there were two possible outcomes that the biopsy would reveal--both of them not wonderful.

Wrong again. There was a third option that no one thought of.

The biopsy revealed and this is directly from Dr. Joyce his oncologist:

"I was somewhat surprised but I will share with you what happened. In a nutshell, no cancer was seen. Meaning no Hodgkin's Lymphoma was seen nor was there any evidence of non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. What was seen was what is called dense sclerosis which is just tissue that is not cancerous - benign tissue basically."

It is NOT cancer. The rest of his body and previous cancer seems to have responded well to the chemo treatments.

What is it? In the words of Both Dr. Joyce and Dr. Robertson in Indianapolis, "nothing has been incredibly straight forward with Zach's situation." We remain very hopeful that what this means is that Zachary is on his way to a complete cure.

Zachary continued his ABVD chemo this morning at 10:00. He will continue this treatment for another two months. They want those cells dead, dead, dead and never come back.

We are a bit confused and have a level of discomfort with the situation that no amount of data will take away. His cancer has continued to develop in untraditional ways. Having said that, in the words of a favorite song, "I'm walkin' on Sunshine, yeah, yeah, and don't it feel good."