Halfway There - 2017 Edition

Clinical Trial - Week Two is in the books and by all accounts, it's an improvement. For one, the actual infusion was three hours shorter. For another, the actual participants (that would be me) approached it a little smarter. The only issues we had were: 1) the food cart that usually goes around didn’t make it around because they were short on volunteers for the day (Matthew - where were you?) and 2) the Benadryl IV made the room spin like I drank a bottle of Ouzo. Unfortunately, I hadn’t. But fortunately, the vertigo subsided after about 10 minutes. 

The side effects were also better than week one. This is counterintuitive as it is possible for side effects to accumulate throughout the course of treatment. It happened to some extent the first treatment course five years ago, but again, that involved a more toxic chemo (Bendamustine). In fact, I still blame Bendamustine for some long-term mildly annoying effects which I won’t go into here. 

But this week, Saturday produced only the mildest effects that didn’t interfere with my exciting day of errands and lawn mowing. And by Sunday, I went for one of my best runs in a LONG time. A short run (yes, PB, a baby run), but one at my normal pace and with no sluggishness. All in all, a good week. 

But here’s the catch. For the 99% of us cancer patients/survivors who have at least a mild amount of canxiety (cancer anxiety, that is), we start thinking, “Wait, if the side effects aren’t bad, does that mean the treatment isn’t working?”  To which, I’d say, “No. It doesn’t mean that at all.” In fact, we’ve written about that on our Dana-Farber blog. We won’t know how well things worked for 2.5 months post treatment when we do scans again. What should we expect for then? What if it doesn’t work? What if it does? Where do we go next? All good questions that I’m going to try not to dwell on until we get there.

--Michael

ps - for reference, here's what I was thinking halfway through my six-month chemo regimen five years ago