Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Absolutely Maybe

Dear blog,

I met with the O'bleness oncologist, Dr. Sarwar, today (the close one). He had received none of the staging information from Dr. Jain (the far one) which was supposed to be ready 'late last week'. But, regardless of all that information, the treatment is the same. ABVD, 6 months.

That's two months of warm up, two months sustained heat and two months cool down, for my fit readers. Some absolute maybes there. It may work. I will absolutely be able to tell if it is working. Around the time hair starts dropping out lymph nodes which I can feel are supposed to reduce in size. If that's not what happens, we absolutely know what kind of even more caustic drugs they will drip into me then. I'll let that go until we see how things are progressing in a few weeks.

I will certainly get a port. When my good insurance kicks in. That's 4-6 weeks from 1-2 weeks ago. Y'all are smart, you can figure that out.

I start Monday, 8:30 for five hours. My guess is about an hour for each of the A,B,V and D drugs they need to drip. Y'all have google. Go nuts. Poison is set for a biweekly schedule thereafter. I didn't ask if six months is generally 24 or 26 weeks. I guess I'll find out around Christmas.

Cordially,
Ian Hogan.

P.S. I got a call shortly after posting. There is no cancer in my bone marrow. Stage 3B.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Nothing I can think of to say is especially sensitive, except the ones that are utterly meaningless, such as "It sucks that you have stage 3b cancer, but it's slightly less sucky than if you had stage 4b cancer."

Everything that isn't obvious is somewhat rude. For instance, calling it a port makes me think it should be USB-compatible. Perhaps it should be called a nozzle or a socket or something. Something that makes a sound like "Shhhhnk" when you stick a tube into it. Like the plug in the back of Neo's neck.

Yes, totally insensitive. I should probably stop now.