We were informed at our last visit to DFCI that I was a subject of a scientific paper. That's the second time in two weeks!! All I had to do with it was to say yes and let them study me as I was given this treatment, this blood thinner, this chemotherapy, this method of controlling life-threatening reactions to said chemotherapy and for them to study what feel like gallons of blood they take from me every two weeks.
What they seem to find most fascinating about me is that I am still alive. An anomaly. This cancer has a history of taking a person out in the first six months.
How do you answer the question, "Why are you still alive?" The only thing I can come up with is Damned if I know.
Chemo number 24 is on Tuesday, 11 hours in the chair and another 46 carrying a pump around. I have found an old photography vest I last wore in Morocco eighteen years ago that fits the pump very nicely.
-30-
Sunday, March 25, 2018
Wednesday, February 14, 2018
Twenty Chemotherapies Later
If you are wondering where we've been, it's a place in Boston called Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
After being clear of Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma for 8 years, tumors were found in the gallbladder I needed to be removed due to a serious infection brought about by a blocked duct.
Unlike the Lymphoma, this is not curable cancer. As a highly aggressive tumor, the chances of long-term survival are slim. The options were surgery with chemotherapy or don't do anything and just let it kill me. Anyone who knows me knows that I am not a kind that gives up easily.
We opted for the surgery followed by chemotherapy. The surgery removed all visible tumors but there were still tumor cells which developed over a year. Then we started standard chemotherapy which had a minimal effect, then we tried one possible alternative which too had a minimal effect.
The second alternative, based on the existence of a DNA variation found in people susceptible to breast cancer has slowed the tumor growth considerably. That has been the twenty bi-weekly chemotherapies I've had so far and am scheduled to continue until it too stops working.
And it will but we don't know when. Isn't that true of life in general?
I have visited death several times in my life. I call them my practice runs. One of my favorite buttons from the 60's, after Frodo Lives!, is "He who isn't being born is busy dying." I will continue being born every morning when I wake up until the morning I don't.
-30-
After being clear of Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma for 8 years, tumors were found in the gallbladder I needed to be removed due to a serious infection brought about by a blocked duct.
Unlike the Lymphoma, this is not curable cancer. As a highly aggressive tumor, the chances of long-term survival are slim. The options were surgery with chemotherapy or don't do anything and just let it kill me. Anyone who knows me knows that I am not a kind that gives up easily.
We opted for the surgery followed by chemotherapy. The surgery removed all visible tumors but there were still tumor cells which developed over a year. Then we started standard chemotherapy which had a minimal effect, then we tried one possible alternative which too had a minimal effect.
The second alternative, based on the existence of a DNA variation found in people susceptible to breast cancer has slowed the tumor growth considerably. That has been the twenty bi-weekly chemotherapies I've had so far and am scheduled to continue until it too stops working.
And it will but we don't know when. Isn't that true of life in general?
I have visited death several times in my life. I call them my practice runs. One of my favorite buttons from the 60's, after Frodo Lives!, is "He who isn't being born is busy dying." I will continue being born every morning when I wake up until the morning I don't.
-30-
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