Chemo plans

I’ve been getting some questions along the line of, “Why chemo, didn’t they get it all?” It’s a bit more complicated than that. Yes, they were able to remove the whole tumor. But surgery disrupts everything in the region and there’s going to be dislodged cancer cells spewing around a bit afterwards. Also the cancer had (just barely) started to spread. It’s not like it’s taken hold all through my body or anything. But it had creeped into one nearby lymph node and had started to set up shop there, which is concerning.

They removed that lymph node during surgery (and a bunch of others just to be on the safe side). I currently have no known tumors or remaining infected lymph nodes, but there’s definitely random cancer cells wandering around and we need them to not get settled down and comfortable. My chemo is basically a mop-up exercise.

After my recent post where I said, “If someone would just send me chemo pills, I would be set!”, a friend of mine gently suggested that chemo is not going to be as easy as someone dropping some pills in the mail. Well, ok, yes, I guess I figured that.

First I need to wait to get out of quarantine (because I traveled home from Boston I’m still in quarantine. The cancer center won’t let me come for an appointment). Then after quarantine I’ll need to do a bunch of blood work and possibly some other tests. And there are specialists to consult. It will all take time.

All this past week I spent waiting to hear back from the doctor. First I was told the doctor would call on Monday, then Tuesday, then Thursday, then Friday…I won’t bore you with the exact details, but it involved repeated calling to various doctors offices, emailing my medical records to anyone willing to give me an email, and being glued to my phone, waiting. It’s surprisingly stressful waiting for a doctor to call.

All week long I’d hand my phone off to John if I needed to run to the restroom or something, so he could answer it for me. And every time I absentmindedly set my phone down somewhere I got frantic. “Were’s my phone?! Where’s my phone!?” We waited and waited and called to check back, and resent records over and over, and checked back again, and finally, on Friday evening, a doctor called!

I don’t have an actual appointment yet, but at least now I have a doctor with a plan. I’m expecting to start chemo in just over a week from now. I’ll be put on a combination of pills and IV injections. I’ll start the pills on the same day as my first IV. Then I do the pills every day for two weeks. Then I take a week off. Then I do another IV and pills for two weeks. So an IV every three weeks, and daily pills for two out of three weeks. This goes on for 12 weeks. That’s only 3 months, which is much shorter than the 6 months we were originally told to expect. So that’s excellent!

During treatment I’ll get my blood drawn frequently so they can check for various things like my white blood cell count. If I seem to be getting too immunocompromised, they can give me things for that. Also she told me that the drugs available for nausea are a lot better than in the past, so I’m hoping I won’t be too miserable.

I will also need to do another MRI, which I think should go fine. I learned a lot last time about how to not get claustrophobic. I’m not sure when I’ll have that scheduled – fairly soon I think, as a post-surgery baseline for comparison to future testing.