cancer – day 147
You know, I had meant to do all this writing today and get “caught up” on my blog, but I just feel crummy. And it’s a busy day relatively speaking, I’m waiting on the sac pharmacy place to deliver my emend, which is always stressful because they’ve missed almost every delivery they’ve committed to, and the emend is ridiculously important for Monday so it’s really important that the deliver today, and they supposedly are delivering before noon but of course they haven’t shown up yet and it’s noon. My blood draw is at one o’clock, and then I have to go to Brian’s and clean up everything from the cats and pack them up and take them back to the kennel, and then we’re meeting my parents for an early dinner at Logan’s, so there’s not a lot of quiet time. Tonight is Spotlight’s 6th anniversary party, and I was really hoping to at least stop by there and maybe do a ballroom dance or two, but with how I feel it’s probably a lot more likely that I’ll want to go straight to bed after dinner with my parents.
And of course, there’s the looming dread of Monday and how awful I know I’m going to feel next week, and the week after, and the week after that. Just one more infusion, I know. Everyone keeps telling me that, and I agree it’s good that there’s only one more chemo infusion, but that still doesn’t make me want to go through it. No offense to anyone who’s tried to use that as a “stay positive” note to me this week.
2PM
At the blood draws, they always ask how I’m feeling, and we always get into this discussion about what symptoms I’m having at the moment and the severity and all that. Well today I really didn’t want to have that conversation, but it turned out to be important that we did, because the tech then reported it all to Heidi, who reported it to Dr. Lombardi, and then both of them came over to the infusion center (again!) to see me and ask me more questions. The neuropathy has gotten quite a bit worse. Lombardi had me walk down the hallway because I told them I’ve been bumping into stuff, and it turns out I favor my right and can’t actually walk straight down a hallway! At least I didn’t bump into anything though (it was a wide hallway). Lombardi also had me hold my hands a certain way and he could really see the tremor in my right hand, and I told them about the burning sensation on my left hand and foot that seemed to be like an advanced stage of the fingertip numbness thing.
Anyway, summary diagnosis is a still relatively moderate (level two of four) neuropathy. That’s severe enough though for Lombardi to consider canceling or delaying my final chemo infusion that’s scheduled for Monday, because this neuropathy is a side effect of the taxotere chemo drug. We’re going to go ahead with the appointment with Lombardi on Monday, but they’re not going to mix my chemo drugs until they get a go-ahead from Lombardi on Monday. And he may decide that we should delay my final dose a week or even two, to see if the neuropathy improves or continues to get worse during this time.
The concern is that he doesn’t know with certainty that the neuropathy will reverse itself completely over time. He had one other patient where it was about the level I have and it took about four months but she did have a complete recovery, but he just can’t be sure, and he’s being very careful about evaluating me and considering the long term effects of the neuropathy versus the benefits of completing the chemo (which apparently are pretty high, because he would rather delay a week and get in the full dose than give me just a partial dose on Monday).
He’s a good guy. Gosh, I can’t even imagine what would be happening right now if I were with that first medical oncologist I met with. You know, the one who’s recommendation was for six months of standard chemo without running any additional blood tests to confirm chemo would even be beneficial or possibly harmful in my case. Thank Heavens I didn’t trust that doctor and went through the effort I did to find and then get scheduled with Lombardi back then, instead of blindly agreeing to do whatever the doctor ordered just because he was a doctor. Hey, just because someone is a doctor, doesn’t mean they’re a GOOD doctor! But Lombardi is one of the good ones, one of the great ones actually I think, and I’m lucky to have him as my medical oncologist.
We’ll know more on Monday.