well, y’all it’s been a pretty fucked up couple of months.
the good news is that i had two mris in a row. no new tumors in my noggin and all 13 tumors that dr seung and marcellus wallace gamma knifed are getting smaller. i don’t have to go back for a follow-up for three months. nice.
the bad news is that i’ve had to stop the immunotherapy and that’s a real bummer considering that just six weeks ago my oncologist said “your body seems to be responding well to the therapy.” two and a half months ago, i started getting these excruciating pains in my mid back on the right side. as they got worse the pain crawled upwards, under my shoulder blade, into my shoulder. every time i took a breath, it was like getting stabbed with an ice pick. sharp and focused pain. it was very hard to sleep. finding a comfortable position was near impossible. i had mentioned this to the oncologist and he started furiously looking at the various scans and said that nothing in the scans explained that. he guessed that it was probably a liver nerve getting irritated by a tumor swelling up while getting beat up by the t cells. a week later the pain had moved to the front right, just below my ribs. obviously my liver. over the next few weeks the pain got worse and worse and i tried to stay positive thinking that it was the therapy fighting the cancer. it finally got so bad, like the first time i would have ever pointed at the 10 on the frownie face pain scale in my life, that i had to ask for pain meds. that night i slept better than i have in months. i got another ct scan and it showed one new tumor next to my left kidney, a new one in my liver, and one of the old ones in my liver has grown to 14cm in diameter. so that’s why i’ve been in so much pain and the reason they stopped the treatment.
the next step is a treatment called high dose interleukin 2. it’s a much older form of immunotherapy, from the 80s and it makes you really sick while they administer it. so much so, that you’re laid up in the hospital for a week. the full course of treatment is one week in the hospital, two weeks of recovery at home, then back for another week at the hospital. they say it’s like getting a horrible viral infection, which i suppose you are in a way as the drugs teach your t-cells a new way to fight. i start this therapy on monday 12.11. wish me luck.