A cool morning. I put the top down on the MX-5, attach my “handicapped” (politically insensitive name though it is!) placard to my rear view and drive quickly to Stone Oak and the START Center. [Aside: yesterday, a wildfire shot through parts of Stone Oak, but missed the new medical center there.] When I get to the Start Center, office to Doc Onc1 when he is not at Stone Oak Methodist Hospital, I carefully put the top back up on my little convertible. Why? Because, last week, I left it down at my gym/club where I work out and some evil SOB stole the, WTH, disabled(!) placard.
Why I have a disabled placard: The brain cancer: the docs do not want the balding top of my head, yeh though I wear a baseball cap, getting too much heat during this hot spell in San Antonio.
You need to realize that I am feeling really good, quite healthy, asymptomatic for lung and brain cancer. I go to work every day, except for day 2 and 3 after chemo when I simply feel very tired, play golf on the weekends, do minimally tortured workouts at the gym: squats, abs work (crunches which look nothing like the crunches done by those younger people who do jeans commercials and appear in Men’s Health when they get out of their teens and can no longer pose near naked for Calvin Klein ads) ("Am I getting old?" sang Maurice Chevalier. "Oh no, not you" Hermione Gingold sings back, (Fierst person to guess the show gets a free copy of my new book, Into the Thicket (on your honor not to use Google)), 10-20 presses and curls, treadmill (30-40 minutes at 3.6 mph)—all while listening to my iPod or watching MSNBC on one of the televisions mounted above the treadmills. In other words, except for two days that occur two days after the chemodrip, I feel perfectly normal, perhaps even better than normal since I am eating more healthy food and have settled down at approximately 180 pounds instead of shooting up and down.
So, here’s what happened today:
After putting the top back up on my car, I run up the flight of stairs to the START Center (showing off to myself, no one else is in the area) and sign in, pay my co-pay, sit for a few minutes. A cute phlebotomist calls me back to the “triage area”—I don’t know why they call it a triage area: “triage,’” since M*A*S*H, has always meant sorting out patients into categories to more efficiently treat them (a Hotlips Houlihan innovation left up to the nurses, as I recall). But, that’s what they call their blood lab. I’ll call it that, too.
In Triage, they weigh me, then draw blood from my left arm. They take my “vitals.” Another strange term for temperature and blood pressure. Then I sit in a second “on-call” waiting area and check email on my iPad. Most of my friends are not terribly active in the mornings. That doesn’t take much time. So, I switch to the iReader and continue reading The Six Ages of Paris, a fine book about Paris and its development over the centuries. I just got rid of Napoleon and am coming up on Louis Napoleon and the great architect Haussman who really made the Champs Elysees, the Louvre, the Place de la Concorde, the Touilerie and much of what we consider the “City of Lights” what it is today. I digress? So, I digress.
I get moved to the batter’s box, next up. This small room is filled with cute little Hallmark card (not Allen Hallmark) sayings. It’s like a twelve-step program minus the first steps and most of them do invoke God while the rest are merely inspiring. I don’t mind. Doc Onc1 must have one of the most depressing jobs in the world. Some of the patients I see there are very young: women in their 30s and 40s with breast cancer; children with bald heads; young men wondering “why me?”; and others. If the health insurance death panels approved them for the quite expensive chemo treatments, that means they have a chance of making it. Many of them will not. How awful the job must be to tell even one of them that their treatments have ended and that, no, they are not cured. I would have preferred having one of Sarah Palin’s fictional Government Death Panel’s tell me that than to hear it from a greedy corporation.
Damn, I seem to be drifting. Perhaps because I did have chemo today.
Doc Onc1 comes into the little room with his primary nurse. He calls up my CT and MRI scans on his computer, looks quickly (to remind himself) at the reports and then looks at me. Believe me when I say this: I am, at this time, incredibly nervous, even anxious, sitting on the edge of a chair not meant to have its edge sat upon. I suspect anyone would be the same. These are the results from the first scans I have had in the nine to ten weeks since I had the cyberknife procedure and the first week of chemotherapy. A long wait.
You know, yesterday and today, were the only days San Antonio’s temperature has been under 100 since I got back from Paris and started all this. Apologies for all the French allusions today. I know some people fail to appreciate the French or Paris ("Freedom Fries" were a symptom of that!) Another digression: sorry. But it’s almost allegorical and a story could be made of the long, hot summer and my cancer. I am not, personally, up to that. This blog will have to do.
Okay, okay, here are the results:
The tumors are much smaller. The one in the brain shows no sign of activity. The lung cancer has diminished tremendously. Something called “cancer markers” (some oncologists disregard these) are down from 200+ to 75- (these markers are backed up by the CT and MRI). I will continue the chemo once every three weeks, probably for a long time. Every nine weeks, I will have new MRIs and CTs (can’t afford to retire!!!!!!!!!!!) and we will revisit whether I should move to quarterly and them semi-annual chemotherapy. Whatever, for safety, I will be on maintenance treatments of Alimpta, probably for the rest of my life. The alternative is far worse. Plus, I do get 90 days of paid faculty sick leave each year.
After seeing the doctor, I almost run down to the Treatment Center (chemotherapy treatments). I sit in my recliner, a nurse attaches my arm to an IV, Alimpta and then Carboplatin drip down into my vein. It’s not unpleasant, and who cares?, it seems to be working.
More before too long. I see my urologist again in two weeks to discuss what all this means for my prostate. Probably good since chemo affects all organs, indiscriminately, except for the brain.
Sounds like a good visit. Hang in there.
ReplyDeleteThanks. And yes, it was a good visit.
ReplyDeletePalmer, I do love reading your words. I can get lost in this as though it were some sci fi story, only I get reeled in by the reality of it all. I am so glad to hear of the improvements and good news and the wonder of wonders of modern western medicine! That is something very rare for me as in our clinic we so often hear of the disastrous affects and lack of success. So cheers to you and Western Medicine and the successful collaboration of it all. I am so glad, selfishly so, as I can count on reading more of your words. Best always, Katy
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