Chemo Round 5 - Updates

Hey guys- sorry for the long silence.

I got home on Thursday, feeling week and exhausted, but otherwise not too bad.  Unfortunately, the next few days consisted of my lowest points.  My mouth got very sore, and my stomach was very nauseated, so eating and drinking became difficult, and I became dehydrated.  Sunday, I was feeling so poorly that Ty had to start an IV and give me a few bags of fluid.  That got me through the roughest part, and with a lot of soup and meds, by Monday morning I felt much better.

I worked all week, and every day I've felt better and better.  As of today (Thursday) I now feel better than I did before my hospitalization- better than I've felt for months, actually.  I'm back off all my support meds and on a normal diet.  My mouth is pretty much healed, other than the taste being mostly gone again.  My back pain is gone- which is something that wasn't even accomplished prior to my hospitalization.  (More about that in a moment.)  All in all, I feel good.  We've been cleaning the house and getting stuff squared away at the shop so that everything is in order for my next round, and I won't have anything to deal with except resting and healing.

So when we first met with Dr Gounder about the drug trial, he mentioned something that may now be relevant.  Apparently there's been a strong trend in the research, that even if the drug does not succeed in shrinking the tumors by itself, if people go back to chemotherapy afterwards, it seems to work better than normal for a while.  Like the drug manages to at the very least, weaken the defenses of the tumors, making them more vulnerable to the chemo drugs.  It's very early to make any assumptions, but it's definitely a possibility that could happen with these two rounds of treatment.  For the moment, I'm taking it as a hopeful sign that my back pain disappeared so quickly after the first round of chemo.  Though it had gotten better and worse at various times, it really hadn't reached a point of disappearing at any point during the drug trial.  It will be a few more weeks before we get any solid information though.  My next round of chemo starts Friday the 3rd.  The pump will be on until Tuesday evening.  After that, it will probably be 2 weeks or so until they schedule the scans, to give the second round time to do it's job.  If the scans show that we shrank the tumors sufficiently to where none of them are posing any immediate threat (like trying to collapse my lung again), we'll move on to the medication Dr Kang is working on procuring from the FDA for me.

So that's where we're at now.  Until the 3rd, it's life as usual.  Then we start the whole fun process over again.

Time for bed- night all!