We took him from the Royal Marsden to St George’s this morning for some blood tests. He will have the operation there tomorrow morning. We are now home and as he was in such a good mood I took some photos to show you the new haircut. By the way, Claudia received this from a family friend in the US who is a cancer specialist…

From: Terrie Pustilnik [mailto:tbpmd@swbell.net] Sent: 19 February 2005 2005 17:35 To: ‘Claudia Blandford’ Cc: harold.behrman@yale.edu; bob.parish@enscitech.com Subject: RE: Christian I hope Christian’s tests have come back OK. I am praying and thinking about him daily. There is a very recent article looking at clear cell sarcoma of the kidney in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (deb vol 22). They had 40 children and were trying to compare 2 different ways of doing chemotherapy. The chemotherapy that they were using was vincristine, doxorubicin and dactinomycin. The patients ranged in stage from 1 through 4. (Stage is determined by seeing if there has been any spread of the cancer or not). Stage I is early and Stage IV means there has been spread . Patients had surgery and usually some radiation therapy to the area where the cancer was following surgery. It appears that the longer chemotherapy treatment was associated with a longer survival time. The overall 8 year survival was very good at 87%. This means that even though your son may have an aggressive cancer, the odds are in his favor that he is going to do well. (But he may be in for a fair amount of treatment).

Christian is hopefully stage 1 or 2, so this sounds positive.