First Chemo

Well, I have survived my first chemo session.  I took a pill, well, actually it was 6 pills that made up the dose.  So I go along to Sloan in the city, they give me an anti-emetic, wait half an hour, give me the chemo pills, wait an hour and send me home.  That's it!  No IV's, no feeling like crap, nothing.  Quite a non-event really, if one overlooks the underlying reason for the pills.  And, I have to repeat this only every 3 weeks, though the whole treatment lasts for 24 weeks (9 sessions).  Quite bloody marvelous actually.  I’m sure the effects build over the course of time, though the drug has fairly minimal side effects.


Maybe I was a tad fatigued but rather tough to tell with the heat wave we've been having lately –me thinks this heat and humidity drains the best of us.  This past week was the low time for white cells  (neutropenic phase) so I stayed in all week.  How good of me!


The PET scan showed that I had a tumour to the right of my incision, and that two lymph nodes in the right groin were inflamed, indicating probable involvement (the technical term for 'maybe cancerous') -not definitively diseased.  Hmmm.  To fix this I was offered a couple of choices; the standard drug called Pemetrexed given by a 10 minute IV; a trial drug called Tesetaxel given by a pill. Both are 3 weekly sessions.  I’m sure you’ve already guessed that I went for the trial drug, and if you haven’t then you’re not paying attention.  It has shown some very good activity in the European trials to date. And, seeing as I am a native European, maybe it will work well for me.


I look at this situation as all positive but there is an underlying dark side insofar as prognosis.  If the drug takes, which I am confident it will, then I’m good to go, though likely having to live with recurrences.  No prob, provided ‘live’ is the operative word.  Another time I’ll look at the alternative –at least I have some.


The past few weeks have been tough for us all, particularly Sue, Dominic and, of course, myself.  Funny how it is the same journey that each of us travel and share, but the perspectives vary widely.  And we’ve been travelling this road for about 15 months now with some good high times mixed with some fairly low ones.  Hindsight will tell whether the place I am at right now is a high or a low.


So, the journey continues, as we hoped it would, just with a slightly different slant than we had thought.  We thought it would be a road to recovery and a gradual resuming of normal life.  Now, we have a slight bump in the road that we have to navigate around.  So be it.  Happy hour and the beach await…


Be well to All,
Chris