First the happy news, which won’t be followed by any sad news. Yesterday I helped out at the Groton Road Race, ferrying supplies for the water stops onto the course, running a clock at the 4 mile mark, and finally cleaning up the water stops after the race. It was not only a fun way to give back to the running community, but I physically felt great doing it. As a bonus, most of my conversations were related to the race and not cancer. For a few brief hours, I felt like a normal person instead of a cancer patient.
It also was a much needed good omen for my ability to return to full time employment later this year. In the past week, there’s been a huge increase in how much I can do before needing to lay down and rest, and I need less rest to bounce back and get back to doing things.
And now on to the latest cancer news. I’ve got something medical related happening four out of five days this week. Nothing is planned for Friday, which is good because by then I’ll be peeing radioactive tracer out my very irritated penis.
Today I had a long overdue appointment with my general practitioner. It was largely about cancer of one form or another. For example, I’ll be doing the ColoGuard colon cancer screening test, because a colonoscopy would be cruel and unusual punishment at this point in time. If you haven’t seen one of the copious commercials for ColoGuard, it involves pooping in a box and mailing it to a lab for analysis. It makes me feel sorry for anybody who lives at an address easily confused with the lab’s address.
At this point, I need to go off on a tangent. Many people in the online cancer communities highly recommend getting a second opinion, but so far I haven’t sought one out. To me, it seems like a lot of hassle to get an opinion that might differ from the first opinion, and then how would I know which is the better opinion? Get a third opinion as a tiebreaker? It’s very difficult to tell an outstanding doctor from a quack if you don’t have some medical knowledge yourself.
So I’ve spent a large chunk of time learning about my disease, the available treatments, and whatever else may be helpful (things like diet, exercise, and using drugs off label). What I’ve learned is that at my stage in the disease, where the cancer is still hormone sensitive, my oncologist is already giving me the best possible treatment from a cancer standpoint.
That said, there does appear to be a link between cholesterol levels and prostate cancer, and this is where potential treatments can fall between the cracks. My oncologist doesn’t know my cholesterol levels, and my GP isn’t a specialist in metastatic prostate cancer (if she were, by definition she wouldn’t be a general practitioner). There are a few rockstar doctors that specialize in advanced prostate cancer and use drugs off label such as statins (cholesterol drugs) and Metformin (a diabetes drug) and claim it helps their patients live longer. One of them is in NYC and is now retired. I’d rather not travel to the big city and try to convince a doctor to come out of retirement to treat me.
But what I can do is continue to look for studies that show evidence for such claims. My GP was happy to write prescriptions for Lipitor and Celebrex at my request when I showed her a study concluding that these helped kill prostate cancer cells in mice. It’s not clear if the results would apply to humans, but since I have high cholesterol and frequent pain, taking a statin and an NSAID will still have benefit, regardless of what it does to the cancer. As for the Metformin, the consensus is that it isn’t a great option for me because my blood sugar already tends to be a bit low at times and dropping it further would outweigh any theoretical benefit. Hey look! I’m working with my doctors as a team to make treatment decisions!
So that’s my latest salvo in the war on cancer, and that’s just today. Tomorrow I go off to the dentist to have what I think is a gum boil checked out. This popped up right after chemotherapy was over, so let’s call it a late emerging side effect of cancer treatment. This is generally the most boring and least worrisome day of the rest of my week. It’s not directly fighting cancer, just dealing with the collateral damage.
Wednesday it’s off to get a bone scan, which is frequently abbreviated online as “BS”. Sadly, I couldn’t work any BS jokes into this post. A BS involves getting injected with a radioactive tracer, waiting for a couple hours for it to get absorbed into the bone, and then getting the actual scan. My understanding is that healthy bone will absorb the tracer evenly. Hot spots on the scan could be cancer or they could correspond to a recent bone injury. One hot spot on a shin probably means you tripped over a piece of furniture walking around in the dark. If the scan looks like a Christmas tree, it’s assumed to be very active metastatic cancer. I meet with the oncologist immediately afterwards to discuss the scan. Hopefully he’s not humming “Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree..” when I walk in. Based on my blood work, there should be huge improvements, but of course if that was certain they wouldn’t need to do the scan.
Thursday I go back to the urologist for my three month cystoscopy. This is where he shoves a camera up my junk and looks for a recurrence of the bladder cancer. I’d be surprised if he finds anything, as it seems reasonable to expect that the chemotherapy would discourage any bladder tumors from growing, even if it’s not the optimal treatment for bladder cancer. As with the bone scan, if there wasn’t some possibility of finding something they wouldn’t be doing the test.
So that’s my very busy week. I’m very happy to be feeling better right now, as that gives me a bit of smug confidence going into the tests and I am truly expecting good news all around. Some great advice I read is to hope that the test results are accurate. Whatever state my cancers are in, they won’t change significantly between now and Friday. Getting an accurate picture of their state is the first step in making a timely change to treatment if needed.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment