Clayton Health Update - 11/13/25

From Darby: Earlier this week, Clayton had treatment on Monday and we got the news that his CEA number actually jumped higher than it has since we have started this round of chemo. It went from 4.7 two weeks ago, to 5.4 this week. Not a massive jump in the scheme of things, but it was a higher trend than we have seen this round. Needless to say, it made us pretty uneasy about whether or not this chemo was losing its effectiveness. His CEA number has slowly been trending up over the past few months, but this was a much bigger jump. Clayton was scheduled for a scan today, a CT with contrast, and Dr. Shalaby said that if any of his tumors showed growth or if there were new growths, we would stop this chemo and move to clinical trials in San Antonio. If everything looked like it was responding, then we would continue with this chemo until Clayton either couldn’t handle it or it quit working for him. Clayton scanned this morning and we heard from his nurse practitioner that the chemo is working and all of the tumors in his body ARE shrinking, some even in half, and there’s doesn’t appear to be any new spots at the moment!! We were honestly NOT expecting to hear that news today at all, t’s hard not to expect the worse when you’re in and out of treatment and oncology offices. We are SO grateful that we will not be needing to travel to San Antonio right now with the season we are in, and that we can stay here for clayton to continue treatment, and that most importantly his body is responding!! His nurse practitioner said this is all really good news, as good of news as we could get other than “no evidence of disease.” We are overwhelmed by the goodness of God to answer our prayers of desperation this week for this scan. Please continue to pray that this chemo keeps working the way that it has, and that Clayton’s body continues to tolerate it as well as he has so far!