Day 162, May Contain Politics

Tuesday was a beautiful spring day.  I woke the Mustang from its winter slumber and drove it to my chemo follow-up appointment.  This is a notable milestone, as not that many months ago I was worried that bone pain would make it impossible to drive this car.  While I’d never call it a comfortable ride, it felt good to get it out of the garage and blast down a highway entrance ramp.

I’m still dealing with side effects which seem to be sticking around longer than they did in previous cycles.  Based on past history, my blood counts will be dropping for about another week before rebounding, so feeling blah or worse is not unexpected.  I feel like I’ve been through one heck of a fight, but you should see the other guy.

I haven’t run in over a week now, but have been going for regular walks.  With better weather and fewer side effects right around the corner, I haven’t felt the need to push myself to run. Things will improve, just not as fast as I’d fantasized about.

When my body feels crappy, the emotions usually plummet taking my optimistic outlook down with them.  I start to worry about “what ifs”, such as “what if I lose my health insurance”.  Cancer is a medical catastrophe that can easily turn into a financial catastrophe if you have to pay for treatments out of pocket.

I must keep reminding myself that in my here and now, I have both medical and disability insurance that are keeping me financially fit.  This allows me to focus all my energies on fighting the disease and not worry about keeping a roof over my head.  Some cancer patients have had to make tough choices between treatment or paying for their kids college education.

In addition to being happy about insurance, let’s take a moment to be thankful that all my planned chemo infusions were completed on the original schedule.  Many patients have had to delay infusions because their blood counts haven’t recovered, or they’re having serious side effects.  As significant number don’t get all the planned treatments because they’re either not tolerating it or blood tests imply that they’re not working.

Though chemo is done and seems to have done a great job, now is not the time for any “Mission Accomplished” banners.  There are still fights ahead, though they should be much less dramatic.

While I am still hoping to be one of the lucky few men who achieves something resembling a cure, the odds of that are only slightly better than the odds of winning the lottery.  It’s all well and good to play the lottery and hope you win, it’s another thing to plan your financial life as if you’re going to win.

The most likely outcome for me is that having cancer will resemble having diabetes.  I’ll be on hormone therapy indefinitely to keep it under control.  There will be side effects from ongoing treatment.  The risk of a heart attack is increased.  Osteoporosis is more likely.  There will be regular testing and monitoring of my condition.

Where cancer differs from diabetes is that cancer has a nasty habit of mutating to become resistant to treatment.  Medical science is not only coming up with new treatments, but is starting to understand why treatments stop working.  There are many things in the pipeline that stand a good chance of working when currently available treatments fail.

Enough with thankfulness, let’s whine for a moment.  I’m finishing chemo and dealing with the lingering side effects just before taxes are due.  Apparently chemo doesn’t cure procrastination.  The disability insurance company is also pressuring me to apply for social security disability.  The punchline is that social security benefits will probably be approved right around the time I’m able to return to work.  Thanks for listening and letting me get those annoyances off my chest.

Back to being hopeful.  There’s lots of reasons to be very hopeful about my future, though it’s very likely to be a long and drawn out battle with many highs and lows.  Of course, if treatment does drive the cancer to extinction I will be every bit as happy as if I won the lottery.

After the initial nightmare of my diagnoses, I’ve been exceptionally fortunate in my treatment.  My wish is that we as a society, as a nation, as human beings on planet earth, are not only able to find a solution to the problem of cancer, but are also able to find a way to deliver that solution to all cancer patients.

Day 154, Turning Point

As I write this, the side effects of my sixth and final cycle of chemotherapy are closing in around me.  I’ve just thrown a couple ibuprofen into the looming darkness, and they are holding it at bay just a little longer, hopefully long enough for me finish this post.  But the strange truth is, I’m welcoming the darkness this time.

Suffice to say cycle five was very tough on me both physically and emotionally.  Since my diagnosis five months ago, the theme of my treatment has been “things will get worse before they get better”.  As cycle five was so much worse than cycle four, it became impossible not to worry about how bad my sixth and final cycle would be.  It was very tough emotionally.  If I knew any government secrets I would gladly have told them to avoid further torture.  Tears were shed.  An object may have been thrown while screaming obscenities.

But, strangely, wonderfully, and completely unexpectedly, this cycle isn’t starting off as badly as the last cycle.  Contrary to my expectations last week, I not only made it to the last indoor track session of the season, but I was able to maintain a slow run for over a mile to start.  It was not only a much needed emotional boost, but I imagine getting the bodily fluids flowing helps to spread the drug around to all the nooks and crannies of my body and leaves no place for the cancer to safely hide.  Kill them all, take no prisoners.

I also underestimated the emotional boost from simply knowing there is no next cycle.  If there is a darkest moment in my treatment, well, that would have been when I was having radiation treatments while living with a catheter and recovering from surgery.  But, if there’s a second darkest moment related to chemotherapy, it either has already happened in cycle five or will occur in the next week or two.  Once the bottom of this cycle has been reached, I should be on an indefinite trend of improvement.  In the not too distant future, I should finally have more good days than bad days for the first time in half a year.

To be sure, there are still challenges ahead.  One challenge is continued testing and another set of scans, or what I prefer to call gathering enemy intelligence.  Basically, the oncologist needs a recon mission to assess the enemy casualties caused by his nuclear bombing of my body.  Hopefully that will corroborate the wonderful news that the blood tests have been producing.  And of course there will be more cystoscopies to see whether my bonus cancer has returned to my bladder.

The other challenge is that the current plan is to put me on a rather new and expensive drug to continue the battle.  This may introduce new side effects, though it should be nothing so drastic as chemotherapy.  And unlike chemotherapy, the side effects should be steady and predictable.  Chemo is particularly cruel as the cycles put you on an unpredictable roller coaster and you never know quite how you’ll feel on any specific day.  Why else would my final cycle be more tolerable than the previous one?  Actually, I have a theory about that.

I started cycle five with runs the day before, then the morning of treatment, and finally the day after at the indoor track.  That left me tired and crabby.  Add in some over enthusiasm when sprinting at the indoor track and I ended up with a muscle injury.

Muscles don’t seem to recover as well during chemo.  This makes perfect sense as chemo causes a lot of collateral damage.  The body is very busy repairing and cleaning up after the latest battle without me adding excessive exercise on top of it.  One victim of friendly fire has been my digestive system, making it harder to get energy and raw materials into the body just when they’re needed the most.

So I’ve learned the benefit of balancing exercise with quality rest.  Something along the lines of every mile walked or ran has to be compensated for by binge watching an equal number of episodes of some show.  It also means doing more walking and less running, and trying to mix in a bit of strength training which I need to get much better at.

Saying this cycle is off to a better start than the previous one isn’t just a feeling.  My blood tests also show that I’m less anemic and have higher protein levels than I did on the previous cycle.  So while I felt too tired and sore to go running ahead of my final cycle, the body was evidently making a lot of progress.

So I look back to the looming darkness and say “bring it on, I’m ready for ya!” The sooner I get through it the sooner I get to the better days that are waiting for me on the other side.  The past five months of battle are behind me.  I can see the finish line in sight, and it’s time for the finishing sprint!  Sort of.  Most of this finishing sprint will be spent on the couch.  I hear Ricky Gervais has a new series on Netflix.

Day 136, The Dark Days of Chemo

It’s that time in the chemo cycle where my optimism that the side effects won’t be so bad this time is punctured by reality.  That reality is that the effects are mostly getting worse each cycle, as if this chemotherapy thing would eventually kill me if the cycles continued indefinitely.  Happily after one more cycle they will stop and with a slight bit of hope and some time my body will make a full recovery.  That is, excepting the bits of cancer.  We want those bits to die and not recover.  Based on how I’m feeling today, they’re having a slow and painful death.  Hope they like the taste of chemo!

Not that long ago I blogged about how I was able to clean up after a blizzard during the first weekend after treatment.  Yesterday a measly inch of snow defeated me.  Just pushing the snow to the edge of the driveway was causing muscle pain, which is a brand new side effect for me.  Somebody more circumspect than I might calmly take a break at this point, but not me.

When pushing my limits I’m supposed to break through them and do amazing things and post all about it on Facebook.  But not this time.  Definitely not this time.  I became frustrated.  I knew it was time to take a break but first I needed to send mother nature a message so I opted to angrily and forcefully stab my shovel into the nearest snowbank.  Of course, such extreme feats of strength are punished with muscle pain, and I ended up on my back on the driveway waiting for the consequences of my obstinacy to wear off.

On the digestive front, constipation was about to change to diarrhea as usual, with the accompanying need to scurry off to the bathroom urgently.  Of course, with my newly discovered muscle pain, it turned out to be more of a blend of hobbling and a silly walk rather than a scurry, but it was still fast enough.

But it turns out I didn’t actually have much diarrhea, just epic amounts of gas.  Unbelievable amounts of gas.  Not just a quick “brap”, but sounds that had a beginning, middle, and end.  Some farts had verses and a chorus.  I began to give them titles, such as “The Ballad of Bean Burrito”, even though I’m wisely avoiding beans and Mexican food until my digestive system stabilizes.

So today I’m feeling sore and sleep deprived with a very sensitive digestive tract.  The cat decided to keep me company by laying down in my lap.  Now there’s two things you need to realize about our cat to understand the full effect of this moment.  The cat is very shy, and until today would only lay down in my wife’s lap.  Now that I’ve been home for a few months, he’s gradually warmed to me and finally, today, decided not only to walk onto my lap but actually stay there and receive some petting.

The second thing about this cat is that he has to spent at least 5 minutes kneading your lap and everything around it before lying down.  This included my very sensitive lower abdomen. So here I am, defeated and suffering chemo side effects, with the cat in my lap for the first time and he’s forcing his paws repeatedly into my tender abdomen, and I’m taking it because he’s so darn adorable.

Speaking of the cat, I had a strange nightmare not long ago.  I dreamed of coming back home from a weekend away and finding all the other cars missing.  It seemed the cat had a bender of a party while we were gone, and the cars taken out for joy rides and abandoned after being crashed or driven into lakes or who knows what.  I never could get a straight answer out of the cat.  I woke up not only angry at the cat, but wondering how to file an insurance claim without a police report, which the cat failed to get.  I can’t believe the feline is that irresponsible.  Does anybody else ever have nightmares like this?

So this was my first weekend of cycle five.  I’m a bit pessimistic at this time, but that’s a natural consequence of the treatment and generally not feeling well.  My goal right now is to get through this period without making any important decisions, and see how I feel later this cycle, and especially how I feel after my next and last cycle.  Sometimes I just have to be patient and let the cat beat me up a bit.