I think I skipped #22 but I'll call this one #25 anyway!!! More Chemo!!!!!

Yet Another Round of Chemo:  I Win a Few More Rounds

After getting in from New York last night, I slept fairly restlessly.  You may recall that before we left San Antonio, I had an MRI of the brain and a CTscan of the lungs and abdomen and liver.  Why the abdomen and liver?  Just to be safe.  Those scans were in the back of my mind each day and night I was in the City.

So, today, I was scheduled for additional chemotherapy (alimpa, carboplatin and avastin™ —the new drug fabricated by Genentech) and a chat with Doc Onc1 about the two scans.  I was, I confess, a bit nervous.  I got to the Start Center for Cancer at 8:30 because they always draw blood, check my urine (not for drugs), weigh me and take my vitals.  They have the results before I’m ready to see the doctor at 10 a.m.  After seeing the doctor, I have my chemococktails and read a book while it drip drip drips into my arms and those drips go off to fight both the good and the bad cells affiliated with blood delivery to cells.  This is a huge, on-going war waged entirely in my body and all over my body [See Bob Steck's Message (not available most places) on Cancer as a War We Fight Within Our Bodies].  The chemo is non-directional and will fight heavy users of blood (e.g. cancerous cells and good cells, too, not vampires) wherever they may be in your body whether the MRI or CTscan can see them or not.  The avastin ™ is more targeted and can actually get into the brain to fight cancer cells there.  Until avastin™, that was not really possible.  I (wish I had Genentech stock—I might have in my TIAA stock fund.

I piss off yet another very nice nurse

Anyway, at 10:20, Anita, Doc Onc1’s nurse comes in and tells me he’s running twenty minutes late because of an oncological emergency at the hospital.  I ask her if she means he’s running forty minutes late and she says no, he said twenty.  I ask, Where is he?  Hiding behind you?"  She says at the hospital.  I ask “Who’s on first?”  She doesn’t understand.  I explain, not the allusion to the old baseball joke, but that since my appointment was at 10 and it is now 10: 20 and he’s 20 minutes late, he should be standing in the door right now.  She sighs and says she means twenty minutes from now.  And I say, oh...he’s forty minutes late.  She leaves.

Doc Onc1 Arrives

Finally, he does make it into the office—at 11:00 a.m.  He cranks up his computer to view the med records from the radiology clinic.  And says, “If you don’t mind, we’ll run two more full chemo treatments.  Then, we’ll start maintenance.”  I ask “What’s wrong? I thought we were starting maintenance after today’s chemo.”  And therein lies a tale.

The tale:  Each time Doc Onc1 or Doc Onc2 (I have not seen the second of the Docs Onc since I had cybersurgery) wants to do something, I disappear for a while.  Prior to the cyberknife sugery and the first chemotherapy treatment, I lose myself and Susan in Europe for a few weeks.  When I return, ZAP!!!!,  I get both evil procedures. But I loved Europe and both procedures were extremely effective.  This time, Doc Onc1 had thought he’d move to maintenance after the chemo I had this morning.  I was supposed to have had it last Tuesday, instead, ZAP!!!, I go to the City and see Broadway plays, the superb Willem deKooning exhibit at MoMA and relive my youth by hanging out at Occupy Wall Street for a while.  So, today, I am told that Doc Onc1 wants to delay shifting to maintenance until after two more full chemo treatments.

I gulp (I hate chemo!!!! And its after-effects) and ask why?  Has the prognosis changed?  He explains that yes, the prognosis has changed a bit.  Seems I have been doing so well on chemo (markers moving from 200+ to 75- to today’s 27) and my lungs sound clear and the cancer there is retreating and that’s also happening in the brain and lymph node and I am tolerating the intolerable so well that he wants to try to reduce all of the cancers until they are almost not detectable at all (I'm out of breath!).  At that point, we might try cyberknifing what’s in the lung or just cutting out what’s left.  At any rate, even if that does not happen, we can move on to maintenance.

Good News Day!!!

So, a good news day again.  Though a nervous day in the making.  I went to work for an hour after today’s chemo (which lasted three hours) and then out to Robert Flynn’s house for his signing of his new "Jade" book.  Had a good time.

Thanks for reading.

I Grow Old (#24)

I do grow old…and the mermaids are singing each to each and not to me.  I did have a peach today:  delicious.

Yesterday, Monday, October 17, I was scheduled for both a CTscan (lungs) and MRI (brain).  I suspect the MRI found nothing but oatmeal.  I woke up this morning, prepared to visit huge machines that I would be slid into on narrow beds, and noticed, when I opened the daily paper that it was already October 18. 

I would like to say I “hopped” into the MX-5 (sounds so much better than Miata, doesn’t it?) and raced to the South Texas Radiology Clinic [STRIC], but honesty compels me to say I slid into the driver’s side seat and, in spite of cool weather this morning, flung the top back. Prepared for almost anything, I went first to Jim’s on Blanco and Loop 1604 for a hearty breakfast of eggs and whatever came with them.  I spotted #50, David Robinson, the Admiral, a couple of tables over and managed to resist pointing at him and going ga-ga-ga-ga.  I’m sure he would have been appreciative had he known. 

The news is that we may not have a basketball season until after Christmas.  I think the owners are shooting themselves in the feet.  This is not like the auto industry where unions take pay cuts because the industry is in trouble; this is a case where the owners have gotten more and more greedy and want to change the CBA downwards.

Afterwards, I drove over to the START Center and confessed to my time reversals and basic guilt.  They rescheduled me at STRIC and I drove a mile down to Hardy Oak to get zapped once more.  The CTscans don’t bother me and the MRI is a bit better since they opened it up a little.  But you still get those machine gun sounds.  Years ago, when I had my first MI, I discovered that I have claustrophobia and was shaky for almost a full week afterwards.

I woke up, also, to the news that the UT Health Science Center at San Antonio’s Medical School had been placed on probation by its accrediting agency for improper supervision of faculty and students.  That has nothing to do with me nut thought some people might want to know.

I’m going away for a week and then will come back to San Antonio to find out whether the cancer has continued retreating or has stormed back.  I suspect things have improved.  I’ll let you know.

Interlude while Staying Active (#23)

Not exactly a newsflash, but I have been feeling great for two whole weeks now.  And actually felt pretty good the week before that.  But then, the week before that was a chemo week.  It’s amazing to me how many people I had not suspected had cancer have come out of the cancer closet since I started this blog:  four friends and colleagues at St. Mary’s alone.  It’s almost as if they’ve been a little bit afraid to mention it because they think friends might avoid them  That has not been true for me at all.

In spite of the fearsome illness I do have a full schedule coming up:  a reading on 11/11/11 with Marian Haddad (still our best-selling poet at Pecan Grove Press) and Glover Davis (Marian’s mentor from San Diego State University.  It is not totally coincidental that the reading is on the numerically interesting day.  The weekend after that, I’ll be reading with Dr. Mo H Saidi, a Persian American gynecologist (retired) who is also a poet, and Jim Brandenburg, a poetry therapist.  Tomorrow: golf, followed by a Board Meeting for the Voices de la Luna magazine and then a meeting at the Menger Hotel with an activist Viet vet named Bob Streck.  Bob and I have only met via the internet, so this should prove interesting. 

Then, on Wednesday, Susan and I are flying to New York for a week to see a variety of shows (a musical, Shakespeare at the Public Theater and three one-acts (by Woody Allen, Elaine May and Ethan Coen).  Very active evenings!  During the days we’ll be at the huge retrospective of Willem de Kooning paintings at MoMA, at the Cloisters and at other museums.  And, we’re going to Occupy Wall Street! and join the Wall Street demonstrations for a bit and shout and scream and have a good time.  We will not, however, sleep in a tent in the park.  I did that while demonstrating against the Vietnam War and once is enough. We will, by the way, be staying at a better hotel than the Dixie, where I lived for much of a summer many years ago, or the Sloan House YMCA which is a threat to both physical and mental health where I stayed for a few weeks on leave from Ft. Meade, Maryland.

I’m kind of booked up for readings and other events through February when I’ll be reading at my undergraduate alma mater, Lamar University, in Beaumont, Texas.  After that, well, I’ve applied for a grant to let me visit various antiwar demonstration in anticipation of a new book I’m working on.  If I get it, I’ll let you all know and you can alert me to forthcoming demonstrations or to do poetry readings in your area.  I am hoping I don’t need the grant.  Why?  Because that would mean the wars are both over and everyone has been able to stop even the terribly small demonstrations that break out from time to time.

I’ll be teaching my favorite course in the spring semester, 2012:  The Antihero in American Literature.  We’ll read books by Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Salinger, Kerouac, Mason and Jong and see Rebel Without a Cause, Platoon, The Last Picture Show and one other movie.  This coming summer, my graduate class in poetry writing looms big.  Ito Romo, author of The Bridge / El Puente, will be teaching fiction the first summer session and I’ll follow that with poetry.

So, what’s this got to with a medical adventures blog?  Just this (I hope I don’t sound like Cabaret!):  no sense in sitting alone in your room….  When you have something like a cancer that can evidently be controlled if not totally eradicated, the best thing you can do is stay active, eat well, get a little exercise, enjoy yourself.

There is *some* new medical news.  The chemo drugs have pretty much caused my blood sugar to shoot up; so, each night before bedtime, I shoot 20 units of insulin into the area around my stomach… subcutaneous!  It works.  I wake up with blood sugar in the low 90s instead of close to 200.  Throughout my medical misadventures, blood sugar has been a recurring problem, but the docs know what to do about it.  The day before we leave for New York, I’ll have a new MRI and see my lead oncologist.  I suspect the news will be good.  I’ll let you know on Monday… whatever.