Next: the Nuclear Option
In my draft folder for this blogging system is a post that blushingly explains how well chemotherapy is going for me and tries to recognize how fortunate I was to have few painful side-effects for an infamously painful treatment.
Then came along four days where I was so tired I barely got out of bed. I thought - maybe I should rephrase that blog post, maybe I'm not that lucky.
Then I woke up on Saturday morning, 3am, with my left arm screaming in pain. I swear I've broken it, but who breaks their arm in their sleep? At 8am Bessie drove me to the urgent treatment center for cancer patients at Johns Hopkins and we got my arm scanned and they spent most of the day trying to find for my arm a sling and a radiologist to give it a proper diagnosis. We left in the later afternoon with a sling, a bunch of prescriptions for pain meds, and little more than assurances that my arm was not completely broken.
We found out on Monday that my cancer-filled upper left arm broke the bone and erupted a bit and that my surgeon said that needs to be addressed immediately. The surgery is planned for Friday and we're doing all the steps we need to do on our end to be ready for it, but we have yet to schedule a specific time yet. I should only be in the hospital a night or two (depending on the pain level) and I would need two weeks before I could resume other cancer treatments.
That's all the drama that's been going on with my arm! How's my chemo doing? Well. . .
Yesterday I had a CT scan to see how well chemo fighting cancer. Answer: not at all it seems! My doctor said that my cancer showed "medium" growth. For a treatment that we hoped would last a year, it was frightening to see the cancer not respond at all to that. Where a cure is basically impossible, buying time becomes the best tactic and we lost three months and one of our best tools to fight the cancer.
What's next? The nuclear (medicine) option!
There's a procedure at the University of Penn hospital in Philly called Azedra that we would enter in that would involve:
- Enter a leaded hospital room
- Get injected with extremely radioactive material
- Chill in my leaded hospital room until I drop below the street-legal radioactive level and can be taken home
- Once home, I would need to isolate myself from other multicellular organisms for a number of weeks until I am no longer radioactive
After that, I presume the cancer will have learned a valuable lesson in how serious we are about this and will not think about growing for at least for the next year, when we can then repeat the Azedra treatment perhaps one more time.
I like this treatment a lot because I get to say my "radioactive levels were not street legal" and there are few side effects aside from perhaps initial nausea and maybe killing all my remaining bone marrow. Seriously, I hope that Azedra can help me buy me a year or two and a few months of being "normal."
Thank you so much for the love and support everybody has given us since this all started. I am blessed to have such wonderful family, friends, and co-workers who have all shown so much love.
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