All of the feelings you’re feeling today (Election Day) is what it’s like to have cancer.
Wild swings between dread and doom, and confidence that everything will work out (even if the path is bumpy), and all the things in between, while succumbing to glancing at polls (don’t do it) and also semi-successfully employing your stress-reduction strategies.
Had scans at Mayo last week. There is slight progression (some lesions have grown, a few new ones cropped up), so my oncologist is pulling me off the trial and pivoting to a different treatment, in the ongoing game of whack-a-mole. I’ve been totally off any sort of treatment the past three weeks as we’ve been addressing liver inflammation caused by a reaction to the immunotherapy. I’m still on a high dose of steroids as my liver numbers jump around, but at least aren’t trending up. And I’ve started a new cancer treatment as of Friday.
We’re kind of working down the list of options: started with high expectations for magical immunotherapy and targeted therapy (a drug that is somehow different from “chemo”) infusion combo…which ultimately didn’t work. It might have slowed progression, but there’s no baseline for the rate of progression, so who knows. Then we shifted to the trial, which was the continuation of the immunotherapy infusion I’d been taking, but combined with an oral targeted therapy drug. That oral drug is one of two that are similar and have been the go-to treatment for a while. Now we’ve shifted to just the other oral drug.
So this is the third treatment, and at the moment, the last in the arsenal. I’m weirdly sanguine about it all. We’re playing the long game, and there’s no way to predict how my body will react to any of it. This third line might be what works to shrink the cancer and put me in an indefinite holding pattern. Also, my oncologist is running two different, brand new treatment trials that are in their final stages of approval and funding, which will open up early next year.
I realized that we’re now exactly one year into this metastatic diagnosis. What were tiny specks of cancer one year ago are now just a few more nominally less tiny specks. I don’t feel any closer to death now than I did a year ago.
There’s a mindless iPhone game I play where you advance until you run out of moves. The game gives you the option to reshuffle the tiles and keep going, or stop. I always choose to keep going. I think I have a way to go until Game Over.
Meanwhile, having no pain. Feeling good. Jangly from the steroids, but I’m used to there being some bullshit as just my normal life now. We’re in California seeing friends. Remember the night after I got my flu shot and all of my nerves short circuited in blinding pain and I thought I’d never leave the house again? The next day I got some morphine and said “Let’s go to California!” Bought those tickets, and haven’t had pain since (and haven’t needed to take more morphine since, either). Gabapentin has been keeping it all under control. I was worried that the toxicity team wouldn’t approve my trip (I’m still being closely monitored for the liver inflammation) but they agreed that if I’d get labs done while I’m here this week, I could go.
Hang in there today (and the future days). May good win over evil.