We had some heavy rain during the last few days. Yesterday, our Stadtliga football match had to be interrupted and turned into a battle with water afterwards – just like Germany vs. Poland in the 1974 World Cup. After the game, we wanted to meet some friends for an outdoor barbecue, what became impossible too because the garden lot was a field of mud.

Although it was my friend Bernd’s party, my friend Ralph offered to move the whole event to his house. You can see both of them togeter with Nadine on a shot taken at another garden party a few years ago. We ended up having a nice evening with a few football matches on the telly, a barbeque on the terrace and good talks with some old friends. We returned home quiet late and although Nadine still feels exhausted the strain was definitely worthwhile.

We were talking to the doctor today. He gave us more details about the analysis of Nadines’s brain scans and layed out his plan for further treatment. Compared to December, the pictures taken in April show that the metastases in Nadine’s head have significantly decreased. April is the date when it became possible to measure the effects of radiation therapy. The additional pictures from June were taken to find out what happened after these effects. The result is: nothing. Which is the best possible outcome because it means that her state is stable and that these nine little bastards in her head aren’t growing anymore – at least for the moment. In the next week there will be another CT of Nadine’s body in order to make the same kind of comparison for her lung and spine.

Normally, medication does only apply to the body, not to the head. For protection of the brain, there is the so-called blood-brain barrier. But if this barrier is broken once, which has happend with Nadine’s kind of cancer, this might change. As her chemotherapy with Eribulin, the substance most likely to apply to the head as well, seems to have an effect, it will be continued in the already established way.

Hoping that Eribulin is the right choice of medication to keep Nadine’s body and head stable, we’re in good mood and have a perspective for the next three months – the next brain scan is scheduled for the end of September. Until then, it’s two Tuesdays with Eribulin and one Tuesday rest. This leaves us with a few time slots of almost two weeks without treatment an we can start to plan for another holiday!

We finally got some comparative results from Nadine’s last brain scans and they are promising: between April and June nothing has changed in her head.  There are still those nine metastases which remained after radiation treatment, but it seems that they are not growing anymore. It was the plan to reach such a kind of state and now it’s up to medication to keep it stable.

Nevertheless, Nadine needs a lot of rests and breaks. We experienced that yesterday, when we visited the birthday party of my former colleague Ben. We went there early but had to leave around 8:30 p.m., when all the talking, laughing and children’s noise became too exhausting for Nadine. So we missed the disco part, but that’s how life is for us these days. As long as her state keeps stable, you won’t hear me complain about that.