Chemo For Christmas!

Aside from the last few days, you really haven’t missed much while I’ve been recovering.  It took awhile to admit, but that hospital stay left me with some depression, and three weeks without leaving the house didn’t help my sanity.  I am sure my family will treasure the greatest keepsake from those three weeks; me incessantly singing the Full House theme song, but replacing all the words with “meow”. 

I had a CT scan this past Thursday at SCCA and went in yesterday to get the results.  I was yapping away about my next surgery and my thoughts on the previous one, and had I been paying a little more attention I might have noticed the concern all over Dr. Whiting’s face.  The CT scan didn’t show that the cancer has spread anywhere, but there is quite the party going on in my liver.  The known tumors are larger than they should be after 2 months off, and there are some new ones, including in the left lobe which we just operated on and should have cleaned up.  Time to change plans.

The second liver surgery is on hold now, and we’re going to do 2 doses of radiation along with chemotherapy.  The radiation process will be different than conventional radiation.  The radiologist will go in with a catheter through an artery that feeds into my liver, and he will deposit little beads of radiation.  Those will clog up the blood vessels that feed the liver tumors and zap the hell out of them.  Because it’s so localized, the side effects I’ll have to deal with should be pretty minimal, and the radiation pretty much stays on my liver.  I met with the radiologist today and learned more about the process.  It’s still relatively new, and only 3 hospitals in the state are doing it now.  Looking up “Y 90″ in your search engine of choice will no doubt give you a better explanation than I did. 

Now pull up images of Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree, here’s where it gets fun.  This procedure usually takes place on Wednesdays, and chemo would take place 3 days later.  Chemo will be similar to my last round; I’ll spend one full day in the hospital hooked up, and two days getting reunited with the fanny pack.  As Dr. Whiting and I were looking at the calendar we saw that best case scenario I would be getting radiation on the 22nd, which means I’d spend Christmas at SCCA getting chemo.  He kept staring at the calendar saying how sorry he was I’d have to do this on Christmas, and just because I’m cruel, I told him my birthday is also December 25th.  Then I said “Hey, we’re doing this so I can have more birthdays, so who cares if this one’s gonna suck.” 

If my hospital stay isn’t out of my system yet, that news officially had me in the dumps.  I was so used to hearing things like “70 percent reduction!” and “we removed 8 inches of colon!” when I was expecting a foot and a half.  It was hard to hear that my liver wasn’t keeping up with all the overachievement.  Deep down I know this new direction will be better, and I don’t have a second surgery looming over my head anymore (I might still have surgery, just not anytime soon).  Dr. Whiting called to check up on me which helped, and I spoke to a friend whose sister kicked breast cancer’s ass.  She told me she remembered a few appointments when her sister also heard that a treatment wasn’t working.  But she’s cancer free now (and has been a wonderful email mentor to me), so I feel a bit more normal. 

Towards the end of my appointment yesterday, while my head was spinning with all kinds of thoughts, I finally got the courage to wearily ask Sam “So.  Am I dying then?”  With more drama than even I usually use, he emphatically said “NNOOOOOO!  I mean, we’re all dying, I have to say that, but we have a lot more options to go through before we start talking like that.”  So there you have it.  I am officially still not dying any more than you are.

Party Pooper

Today was my angry day.  I checked the stages of grief for a cancer diagnosis and I wouldn’t say I’ve gone through all of them but today was definitely the anger stage.  Usually I’m not sure if I’m in denial or acceptance; I think it’s acceptance but sometimes it feels so normal to be going through cancer treatment that I’m not sure.  I won’t go through the bargaining stage; that’s just insulting for everyone involved.  I’m sure depression will sink in at some point once this gets old, but overall I feel like I’ve accepted the challenge.

I had intended to run a few errands and get some chores done today but stayed in bed all day instead.  This cycle has been pretty good so far, with one exception: bathroom trips have been mostly wind and pebbles.  It doesn’t take too long to start wishing for diarrhea, but if the genie won’t approve that one, things get painful after a few days.  Today I was grumpy enough about it I decided leaving my bedroom wasn’t in the cards.  My little cat so kindly confined me to about 1/3 of the bed and even less comforters and blankets.  You can’t play the cancer card with cats, they just don’t give a shit.

I was in pain and mad.  And uncertainty has been creeping up on me lately, adding to a day of terrible feelings.  How do I know if the chemo’s working?  I still have my hair; shouldn’t that have fallen out?  My hands and feet haven’t cracked as I was warned they might, my fingernails haven’t fallen off, and where are these mouth sores I was promised?  Did they switch my chemo with Folgers Crystals?  Sure, I have encountered some side effects, but aside from choosing bed over a social life lately, things haven’t been completely terrible.  And wouldn’t it have to be terrible to kill cancer?

Finally this evening I got a little pain relief and some reassurance in the form of a giant poop.  Before my diagnosis, my poops looked like little piles of spaetzle.  (I ruined my gastroenterologist’s childhood memories with that comparison).  Tonight I flushed the kind of reassurance I haven’t seen in months-my poop looked like a healthy, normal Number Two.  I’m not sure what childbirth feels like, but I suspect it was very appropriate for this to happen on Labor Day.  I do wonder whether telling the internet about my bathroom habits is wise, but it’s rather difficult to censor or put a pretty package around having cancer in your butt.

Today is ending on a much better note now.  Even if it was a painful process, I got reassurance that my tumor is shrinking, as is my angry mood.   Is a day in bed a bad thing?  My cat doesn’t think so.