Going to Emory was our first experience with the clinic environment and unfortunately, not the last. In clinics, everyone tends to have the same appointment time, and they sort of feed you in to see the doctor on a first come first serve basis. If you don't know that you show up on time for your appointment, and find all these people ahead of you. We saw a lady there who was very sick and didn't have an appointment, but who had been sitting in the clinic waiting room for 5 or 6 hours before we even got there, and she was still waiting when we left.

On the other hand our first visit didn't go all that poorly, our wait to see the doctor was under an hour and a half. He really started to fill us in. As usual Jackie had prepared herself and had brought a written list of questions. Did it work -- yes, it seemed to.

For what percentage -- well a number of studies have been inconclusive, but Duke just had some results that showed that over 25% went into remission.

Remission means that the cancer has responded to treatment. It can mean it went away, or it can mean it stopped growing or shrunk. It can mean it did it for a week, or a month, or a year, or 10 years, or the rest of your life. But a month and the rest of your life are, you hope, very different time frames.

The doctor at Emory also said that the treatment was fatal 10% - 15% of the time. He qualified that by saying that Jackie seemed healthy and dying from the treatment wasn't his biggest concern. Actually the major point he made in our asking all these statistics was to remember Rule #17 -- You are unique.

You are alive or you are dead. Those are the 2 choices with cancer. You are not 10% alive or 80% alive -- you are or you are not. The statistics are funny numbers. Use them only as guidelines. Don't let statistics get you down -- between Rule #17 and Rule #34 there's a lot of room for YOU.

We spent a fair amount of time at Emory. The doctor was very open and honest, and that's all you can ask for. At the end of it all we came to the mutual decision that what was probably best (remembering that Jackie had no visible evidence of any cancer) was that she should have standard type chemo. Stronger than before. And after it we should harvest her bone marrow and freeze it (it would last at least seven years in the freezer) for possible future use, knowing that if cancer spread to her bones her marrow would be diseased and we couldn't do an ABMT.

Great -- the decision was made -- time to move forward. Not so fast. We have insurance to deal with.