[hutchibk]

OK, more answers:

1. From the onc regarding Lani's suggestion of biopsy of the illiac crest bone spot: (he never dismisses my questions, he is always happy to answer them thoughtfully and respecfully... he thought it was a great question)
" it doesn’t make perfect sense for the following reason: if you biopsy the illiac lesion and find out certain characterstics about it, you still don’t know if every metastasis in your body has those same characteristics. So, logically it doesn’t make sense that you could guide treatment based on the characteristics of one particular metastatic lesion, any more than you can guide treatment based on the primary lesion.
Also, using microarrays to plan treatment is still way too early for prime-time. Howard Oser, in fact, made the point at the meeting I attended a few weeks ago, that there is currently not good data to support using a commercially-available microarray such as Oncotype to guide treatment. In other words, at this point there is data to use it to make a prognostic decision, but using it to predict how somone will then do with a particular therapy is only an extrapolation that may or may not hold up. 'Feeling' like something may be important, and real data that shows that it is important and proves that it actually can guide treatment are two different things at this point in time."

2. Rich, I forgot to mention that I have been on Zometa for over a year now. I am getting it every three months... I have gone back and added that detail to my original post.