Another day of chemo and this one much longer than normal. We have added yet another chemo drug: Avastin. Unlike Alimta and Carboplatin, Avastin is considered, for some reason I do not pretend to understand a “targeted anticancer drug.” Here’s what the manufacturer says about targeted therapies: Targeted Biologic Therapies are drugs that can be added to chemotherapy, to target specific cancer cells.
That sounds promising and I suspect most of you have heard of the company that developed Avastin: Genentech. Genentech also reports that “Avastin® (bevacizumab) is the first U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved therapy designed to inhibit angiogenesis, the process by which new blood vessels develop and carry vital nutrients to a tumor.” It is, by the way, approved by the FDA for treatment, in combination with Alimta and Carboplatin of “non-small-cell cancers of the lung. That’s what I have.
It is counter-indicated for certain people: pregnant women, children under the age of 18, people about to have surgery, and people who bleed very easily. The only one that vaguely bothered me was the fourth. I am most certainly NOT pregnant and have not been under 18 since I was at French High School on the orth side of Beaumont, Texas. Nor am I scheduled for surgery. Since being placed on an aspirin and Plavix® regimen ten years ago, though, I do bleed fairly easily. Brush against a door: I bleed. Humidity really, really low: I bleed when I blow my nose. We solved that by taking me off aspirin and Plavix® two weeks ago.
Okay, no more scientific stuff. Ask my old teachers at French High School: I was simply NOT one of the best science students around. In fact, Bob Meinig, one of my favorite teachers, a superior math teacher from whom I had algebra and solid geometry, was stunned that I scored highest in my class on a standardized national math test. I explained to him that I merely tested well on standardized tests. That’s true. I always have! As we used to say in Vietnam (at least I think we did): “Don’t mean nothin’!
The addition of Avastin to my chemotherapy cocktails stuck about 110 more minutes to my now every-four-week chemotherapy treatments—90 minutes for the Avastin, 20 minutes for the chemical flush. I have no idea what a “chemical flush” does and I really don’t care to know. I do know that I got to Doc Onc1’s office at 9:30 and did not finish treatment until 2:30!!!! I really shouldn’t bitch about this: there were a few patients there when I got there and still hooked up to IVs when I left.
When I got back to the parking lot, I pushed the top back on my Mazda MX-5 and drove quickly back home. Temperature in the low 90s, a clear sky, wind in what remains of your hair. Hey! Nothing makes you feel better than speeding down a highway with the top down!! Yeh, something does: listening to John Fogerty, car amplifier cranked up high, Bose speakers shaking the little car, while you do it.
Tomorrow, I will go back to the office for my follow-up shot. For some reason, I need shots to counteract the IV drips the day after receiving treatments. I think those control nausea.
In a couple of weeks, I will have another CTscan to see the state of the cancer in my lung and brain and then, in four weeks, yet another chemofest! I can hardly wait. Believe me, it is good that the folks working at the START Center are good people. That cuts back on my sometimes ill temper. Between the next scan and the chemo I will be in New York for a short period of days to see a few plays and musicals. Life continues between post-Chemo exhaustion for a few days and the next chemo treatment.
I am, I think, pretty much on what Doc Onc1 calls maintenance now: treatments every four weeks that will become quarterly treatments. Quarterly treatments should equal 8 days each year of feeling fairly exhausted. I can live with that, but not without it. The prognosis remains positive.
I do wish this were somehow more amusing. Perhaps it would have been had I let it sit a couple of days prior to writing it.
I've been thinking about the pond again and about a poem I wrote not too long ago and seems relevant now for some reason, I hope others can see the reason. It was one of those times when the cam showing the pond got stuck in one place and we all wondered what was happening just out of sight, over there where it was light but where the camera could not show us what was happening, but the mic indicated something was happening. One of those times when you kept movin your mouse as if that wold make the cam move:
Against the Dark
Sometimes bugs, lit by floodlights, glow and appear
to be something they have never been, especially when
they fly low along dusky ground and bright white sears
an image of some swift, small animal into our eyes:
perhaps a cat, a dog, some scurrying fox…we look and then
try once more, knowing that what we see is not exactly lies
but some arching apparition, some glowing ribbon flaring
into life because our sight is not quite fast enough
and light streaks leave us, mouths agape and staring
open-mouthed as if the thing we saw could never be
what it so clearly seemed to be. So we shrug, slough
it off and gaze once more upon the scene, hoping to see
what we have and have not seen before and know is there:
a cheetah, a pride of lions, a herd of wandering wildebeests,
a hundred elephants, elegant giraffes, ostriches, a pair
of often too loud Egyptian geese, a sacred ibis, a knob-billed,
awkward-looking, lazy duck—all too much, a daily feast
for eyes burning with smog and dust in dark cities filled
with cars, with carcinogens that pollute our daily lives,
with jostling crowds intent on so much of so little import,
with graffiti sometimes surpassing in art what it tries
to cover up, some scrawled emblem saying “I was here”
in shrieks of color and this is no idle boast, no sport
to while away the hours, but something we all fear,
that thunders through all of us, a need to show that we are
and what we mean and that we count and that we are not
merely streaks of light against a dark and deepening war
that maims and kills, not some war between men and men, no,
but some ongoing fight that makes us cry and mark our spot
like wild packs of dogs, and like the cock at dawn, to crow.
Sometimes bugs, lit by floodlights, glow and appear
to be something they have never been, especially when
they fly low along dusky ground and bright white sears
an image of some swift, small animal into our eyes:
perhaps a cat, a dog, some scurrying fox…we look and then
try once more, knowing that what we see is not exactly lies
but some arching apparition, some glowing ribbon flaring
into life because our sight is not quite fast enough
and light streaks leave us, mouths agape and staring
open-mouthed as if the thing we saw could never be
what it so clearly seemed to be. So we shrug, slough
it off and gaze once more upon the scene, hoping to see
what we have and have not seen before and know is there:
a cheetah, a pride of lions, a herd of wandering wildebeests,
a hundred elephants, elegant giraffes, ostriches, a pair
of often too loud Egyptian geese, a sacred ibis, a knob-billed,
awkward-looking, lazy duck—all too much, a daily feast
for eyes burning with smog and dust in dark cities filled
with cars, with carcinogens that pollute our daily lives,
with jostling crowds intent on so much of so little import,
with graffiti sometimes surpassing in art what it tries
to cover up, some scrawled emblem saying “I was here”
in shrieks of color and this is no idle boast, no sport
to while away the hours, but something we all fear,
that thunders through all of us, a need to show that we are
and what we mean and that we count and that we are not
merely streaks of light against a dark and deepening war
that maims and kills, not some war between men and men, no,
but some ongoing fight that makes us cry and mark our spot
like wild packs of dogs, and like the cock at dawn, to crow.
Until next time.
--Palmer
No comments:
Post a Comment