Chemo and Shit

It’s been a week since my last confession.

I thought about updating last Wednesday, but I was too wiped. It was when I did my last session of chemo for this go around. Even though this kind of chemo (mono-clonal antibodies) is a walk in the park compared to standard chemo’s, it still leaves me limp at the end of the day. By the next morning, I am fine.

I don’t know if anyone out there knows what mono-clonal antibody therapy is – or wants to know for that matter. I can sketch it out, but I think I will wait to see if someone drops a line asking for that.

Anyway, I’m done for now. I’ll do another CT-scan in a couple of months to see if it did the trick. This is my third time around for this kind of treatment in the last six years. The previous two times produced excellent responses that gave me approximately three years of disease free living. We’ll see about this time.

I wish I could say the same about C. We are pretty much at the end of the line treatment wise there. Our last visit to her oncologist was kind of frustrating because the treatment options are so limited and her kidney function is so low that we are not sure what to try now. I walked out of the session feeling pretty frustrated. For now, we will wait a week and then decide if we can risk another go round with melphalon, the chemo drug she is trying now.

If her kidneys deteriorate any further, then we are looking at dialysis and that is something that no one wants.

The decisions we make now are starting to balance “quality of life” over “length of life” considerations. I hate this.

P.