Thursday, January 26, 2012

Flu, Cedar...maintenance and bright weather


So, maintenance chemo again yesterday afternoon, followed by a B-12 intramuscular injection and then a Neulasta shot this morning.  The injections are to stave off some of the damage done by the chemo.  The numbers:  I have now had nine (9) IV drips of Avastin.  Each injection costs right at $12,564.80 for a total (thus far) of $113,083.20.  The Alimpta costs $1.80 less per drip; so, the cost if approximately the same.  I’m fortunate in that I have decent health insurance from my university.  I wonder, though, about those not old enough for Medicare and who cannot afford health insurance and do not have an employer that provides health benefits.  This is part of why we need the Affordable Health Care Act or, as its detractors call it, Obamacare…and sometimes even RomneyCare.

I am also aware that the costs provided by my health insurance company are not realistic.  Those are the costs provided by Genentech and other drug manufacturers.  The cost paid by health insurance providers have been negotiated downwards from the peak cost by a goodly percentage.  And that is why the Republican deal not to allow Medicare to negotiate with suppliers is so noxious and is so expensive to the government.  Okay, no more politics in this blog entry.

So, the previous time I went in for maintenance therapy (chemo therapy by another name), I developed a bad case of the flu.  Remember:  chemo reduces your natural immune system's ability to protect you.  It took two weeks to get rid of that with powerful antibiotics and, as soon as I did, the billions of cedar trees between here and Fredericksburg and north to just west of Fort Worth decided to get sexual and spread their pollen.  So, I continue to sneeze and cough though the flu is gone.  Neither here nor there.  Doc Onc1 tells me that my lung cancer is no longer visible on X-Rays and that the chemo has shrunk it remarkably on the CTscan displays.  That’s pretty remarkable since the diagnosis of Stage-4 lung cancer was a definite death sentence less than ten years ago.

I am typing this from work this morning and am rushing through it…do bear with me if some sneaky little grammatical problems creep into some of the sentences.  But, it’s a beautiful day and I ventured to work with the top down in spite of pollen dancing in the air and am, off and on, sneezing onto my keyboard.  I do hope you catch nothing from all that.

We have re-jiggered my maintenance schedule so that I can go to Beaumont for a reading at Lamar University (they’re actually going to pay those of us who are reading!) and then fly to Chicago on Leap Day for the annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) where I’ll be hosting a party at the Gage Gallery (arranged by my former St. Mary’s Colleague, Scott Blackwood—a fine fiction writer).  By the time I return, the cedar trees should have ceased their winter frolicking and I should have stopped sneezing and coughing.

Two more doctors to see in the next three weeks:  my pulmonologist and my cardiologist.  Crap!  Add in my ophthalmologist.  More after those visits.

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