Saturday, July 30, 2011

Lets Walk!

The Children's Hospital of Orange County is where Lily's life was saved more than two years ago and where all her treatment was done during her sickness, she also continues to get treatment and checkups at that hospital. CHOC is a non-profit hospital and relies on community support to be able to supply the excellent care they are giving children so as a little way of giving back we will form a team for the annual CHOC Walk in the Park to support the hospital.

We have set up a team page for the CHOC Walk to accept donations to support the hospital.

Team Lily

And there is a Facebook page setup for the team.

Please Help Support Team Lily-CHOC Walk in the Park 2011

We also made a slide show about Lily's journey since her diagnose for the walk.

Why We Walk

We hope you will consider joining our team or donate to a walker and help us support the cause!

Saturday, July 2, 2011

Survival numbers

The kind of tumor that Lily was diagnosed with is very rare and I have been looking for data in the medical literature to get more information about it. I have found 48 reported cases of CGBM since the first documented case in 1917, most being reported in the last 30 years.

I wanted to know more about survival rates so I was trying to find the length of survival from the documentation and it shows that even if the outcome is considered bleak at initial diagnosis, it looks like the worst time is very early after the diagnosis. Note that the statistical sampling in this case is very small, out of the 48 cases, only 39 contained survival information and they only reported the status at the writing of the respective report.

The largest percentage of patients didn't even survive the first week, with 15 cases passing away with this time. Within 4 month another 11 had past away with 1 patient alive at 2 months when the report on that case was written. At 1 year, 4 more cases was reported as deceased.

After the first year, the case reports shows 7 patents still alive with the oldest being 6 years of age. Only one case was reported of a patient not surviving after 1 years age, with a 27 month old passing on.

It looks like the survival rate radically increases if the patient survives the first year after diagnosis, but it is hard to make some real conclusions with such a small amount of data. I can't help to feel cautiously optimistic when Lily now is at 2 year after diagnosis and still have no recurrence.