Nearing the end of our Journey

We met with Aj's Oncologist on Friday and had a very positive meeting. She broke down all of Aj's test results for us. Here are the cliff notes:  Aj has a Pure Mature Teratom, which is great! The tumor was benign and the doctors were confident that the tumor didn't spread. I can't explain how relived we were to hear the confident in the Doctors voice as she explained to us the good news. The one thing that did concerned her was that Aj's AFP went up, not down. She reassured me that this could be normal but we may want to be a little bit more aggressive with our monitering.

AFP is tricky because babies tend to have a elevated levels to about six to eight months of age, doctors are finding that sometime it can take a child up to one year for levels to drop into normal range.  The reason why we keep mentioning Aj's AFP and why we are watching it so  carefully is because AFP can be used to detect certain types of cancer and liver problems.  Kaiser says that "Normal" levels are 0-15, Aj's last AFP test was 30.

We have taken Aj's AFP test for the last 4 weeks and his number have been 35-30-25-30. The raise could just be his little body doing its normal thing, BUT after everything that we just went through I wold prefer to overly cautious than sorry and so do the doctors. We will be checking his levels for the next 3 weeks as well as getting an ultra sound of his liver.

So all in all, I have to say that I think we had some wonderful Appointments and came out very hopeful that we can put this behind us and move on.

Thank you for everyone's prayers. I will make sure and let everyone know in the next months or so when we know for sure that we are out of the woods. But for now we are very happy with what we have in front of us.