Christmas is done and we're in 2015 now. And guess what? Everyone's still here. A year ago, we celebrated Christmas feeling like it could be Amanda's last. The prognosis from the docs in Halifax was not good, and suggested she could very well be dead in a year. We didn't realize it at the time, but her ovarian cancer was still around and still growing. Now we're in London. The docs here figured out that her cancer was not a fast-moving, high-grade, chemo-resistant strain, but a slower-growing low-grade kind. It would scoff at platinum-based treatment, but their testing found it was feeding on estrogen. That revelation led to a new line of therapy: the estrogen-blocking Letrozole . Side effects, yes, but not as severe as what Amanda had from the aggressive chemotherapy or the experimental stuff. And to our astonishment, on the first scan after starting Letrozole, the doctors revealed that her remaining measurable tumours had shrunk. Well, a couple of weeks
Video preservation and personal history are the current mission for London, Ontario broadcaster Scott Simpson.