Philadelphia Bound

Katie and I have woken up each of the past few mornings with the faintest sense of hope that this has all been a dream - a terrible, terrible dream.  Unfortunately, reality sets in pretty quickly and we move forward with our day.  The good news is that we have an excellent team of doctors working hard on Edward's care.  The new people in our life include an ocular oncologist (an eye-doctor who specializes in eye cancer) and a pediatric-oncologist.  The bad news is that retinoblastoma is relatively rare - only ~250-300 cases in the US each year (lucky us, I know).  Thus, at an institution like UVA, they only see 1-2 cases a year, if that.  There are a few institutions around the country that specialize in retinoblastoma and see on the order of 30-50 cases each year.  One of these centers, Wills Eye Institute, happens to be located in Philadelphia, where Katie grew up and her parents and extended family continue to live.  After meeting with our local ocular oncologist and pediatric-oncologist, we have decided to seek a second opinion at Wills Eye and are currently in Philadelphia to that end.   The ocular oncologist that we are scheduled to see is an expert in the field of retinoblastoma and has actually written over 700 (!) papers on the subject.  For those not in the medical field, that is an unimaginable number of papers.  She also is a mother of 7 children and went to Notre Dame (go irish).  We definitely feel that we are in good hands and are anxiously awaiting her evaluation.  We will let you all know how it goes.