Stephanie had a CT scan on Nov 22 and it showed a very good response to the last chemo and shrank the remaining tumors by about half. We are very happy and her counts are up, her breathing is great and she feels good and can get out and participate in some holiday activities. We had a quiet Thanksgiving and Steph went shopping with some friends over the weekend and also to our church Christmas party last night. Best of all, she was able to go on her Make-A-Wish trip to visit the Greys Anatomy studio in California! After months and months of waiting to hear from them, we got a call a couple of weeks ago notifying us that her wish was going to come true! It was very short notice and we flew to LA early Sat morning (11/25). We stayed in Santa Monica near the beach and Make-A-Wish arranged for a stretch limo to pick us up on the day of our visit. It drove us through Beverly Hills and on Rodeo Drive, through Hollywood to Burbank to the film studio. We felt like movie stars! We got a tour through the sets of the hospital: the operating rooms, the reception desk, the locker room, the famous elevator and also Meredith's house and Burke's apartment (very nice!). We watched them filming two different scenes and got to sit with the director and the writers. There are a lot of people hanging around a film set: doubles, extras, set construction guys. They even have someone who follows along with the script to make sure the actors don't ad lib their lines. It's amazing how everything is so fake but looks so real on TV. Oh, except the medical equipment: it's all real. Unfortunately, Steph didn't get to be in the show but we are looking forward to seeing the episode they were filming when it airs in January. We got to meet George (T.R. Knight), Christina (Sandra Oh), Dr. Burke (Isaiah Washington), Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) and Derek - Dr. McDreamy (Patrick Dempsey). They were all so nice! They were all in makeup and looked perfect! Izzy (Katherine Heigl) wasn't there because she had finished filming her scenes in the morning but George called her at home and she came all the way back to the set just to meet Stephanie! We took tons of pictures and Stephanie even got her very own Seattle Grace Hospital ID card and McDreamy's surgery cap (the one with the ferry boat pictures on it).
It was an amazing trip and Make-A-Wish did such a terrific job arranging all the details! As a bonus, we came back on Tuesday night (11/28) to a snowy, freezing Seattle after swimming in the 70 degrees sunshine weather that very morning. Very surreal.
So now Steph is trying to catch up with her school work and we are trying to get our Christmas decorations put up. She won't have another chemo treatment until after New Year's. Hopefully that treatment will finally get rid of all the cancer. Unfortunately, that will be the last time we can use that particular chemo drug.
Love,
Kathy
P.S. I want to thank everyone who has been praying for Steph. We know that it is God who is doing the healing. Keep praying and believing! (Love, Jeb)
