My mother in law has a peripheral nerve sheath cell sarcoma. It's pretty bad, there really aren't treatments for it and the one thing her oncologist tried did nothing but make her feel sick.

I just had lunch with her, Dad, and Joan here at Stanford. Mom is going in, right about now to talk to one of the sarcome specialists about the possibility of getting into a clinical trial on a new drug which is quite effective against a rare form of leukemia, and they're trying against peripheral nerve sarcomas. I hope they will let her into the program. Barring that, I hope the doctor comes up with a suggestion for Mom's regular oncologist as to something else he can try, since otherwise all we're doing is sitting around waiting for mom to die. She's in a lot of pain, now.

Anyway, this has been on my mind a lot the past few weeks, though I managed to kind of put it aside for a few hours at the Woodland Games. I don't feel like writing a lot on X Marks right now, but I'm here.

If you can spare some good karma, prayers, crossed fingers, or what have you for Joans mother...her name is Caroline, that'd be kind of you.