No More Chemo!

Yesterday, the decision was easy to make: No More Chemo!  Instead, I will start the clinical trial in two weeks.

My October 30 scan results show the following:

• no new tumors have appeared
• the little lung nodules all stayed the same size
• the tumor in the psoas shrank by another teeny bit
• the tumor in the pancreas shrank by another 20%

Overall, this entire four-month course of chemotherapy was highly successful! All of the tumors shrank significantly since the chemo started.

The best part is that I am done chemo. Doing the happy dance!

I should probably clarify that I am done chemo for now. The plan is to monitor my insides closely, and if a new tumor appears or if there is significant growth of the old tumors, then we would use chemo like a baseball bat to beat the cancer senseless again.

This clinical trial is pretty interesting.  It will test the effectiveness of a drug (AP23573) that might help keep the cancer from starting to grow again. Presumably, the longer you can keep the cancer from starting to grow again, the longer you live... the longer you live, the better treatments are available...  and the better treatments are available, the longer you live. (I'm feeling dizzy again. How about you?)

It is a double-blind, randomized clinical trial, so no one will know if I am getting the drug or not. I am going to have to say, "The drug that I might be taking..." but that is cool.

Yesterday we started the ball rolling for the clinical trial.  I signed a bunch of paperwork, and then they took a ton of blood for the baseline labwork. Maybe that is why I completely CRASHED when I got home and slept for two hours.  But after that, I felt fabulous and logged on to work for two hours.

I am very excited to be going in to the office this morning, and not just because I put a banana in my filing cabinet last Monday and have not been back since.