Hi - Thanks for asking. Lot's of activity since the initial diagnosis. Here is a summary.

My 34 year old daughter was diagnosed with AA in April. She had two surgeries to resect the tumor. The first surgeon was not the best choice but we ended up finding a very good team at CU Denver Anschutz Medical Center which happens to be where she works. They used technology that is literally on the leading edge of brain surgery. She was the first patient to have inter-operative MRI used during her awake craniotomy in the state of Colorado and the surgeon estimates less than 25 have been performed nationally. They also used neuro-navigation, awake cortical mapping, and fluorescein dye to illuminate the tumor during the resection. That surgery was June 1st and she has returned to her job full time while participating in the standard Temodar and radiation treatments. She is dealing with some aphasia but it seems to be getting better as each week passes and her speech pathologist thinks she will make a full recovery with the aphasia.

We have also hired Dr. Hartmut Stecher in Seattle. He is the founder of a company called Cancer Treatment Navigator (http://www.cancertreatmentnavigator.com). Dr. Stecher is a biochemist, Ph. D. that specializes in immunotherapy options like dendritic cell based therapies, T-cell based therapies, cancer vaccination strategies, cytokine therapies, and recombinant antibody therapies. Hopefully we never have to use his services. If she does have a recurrence we want to be ready to act quickly.

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