Something Evil This Way Comes

It’s two weeks since my last chemo.
I am all grumpy and achey and it’s rainy and wet and it gets dark at 11 in the morning lately.
I had blood work today. That was okay. I’ll find out what’s what sometime next week, when I see the oncologist and have a CT scan and a chest x-ray and all that jazz.
I am choked because I keep getting billions of spam entries thru the comments function of this page, and it can be an enormous amount of work to go through and delete it all. Yesterday I spent about an hour deleting the approximately 35 spam entries that had showed up in 24 hours.
I think there is a special layer of hell for spammers and an uber-special layer for spammers who spam a goddamn cancer blog. I mean, shit, give me a break.

On a happier note, some friends took me out to wrangle up a couple of truckloads of firewood yesterday. That was way cool. The same friends who came by and cut my crazy hedge down into a manageable shape.
Thanks…
So, now between that truckload of wood and the whack o’ wood that used to be another friends’ cherry tree, we have quite a bit. It’s all pretty wet so we will have to improvise, but hey… it’s nothing that can’t be solved with a Duraflame log and some creativity.

So, that’s the word from where I am… achey and grumpy and impatient to start feeling better.
But hey… it’s is getting better in small ways.
I just have to remember that.

Well, we are home from our ovarian cancer symposium in Victoria this weekend.

It was all a bit of a whirlwind, by my standards. If things were a bit more normal, and I had a bit more than 8 days since my last chemo, then it maybe wouldn’t have felt quite so overwhelming.
And it wasn’t *terribly* overwhelming, it was just a bit of a stretch for me.
But it was interesting, and I am glad we went, and I am still thinking through some of the details of it.

In itself, the symposium was a day of covering a lot of information we already knew.
The thing I did find interesting was hearing about the new advances in immunotherapy that they are working on at the Deeley Centre in Victoria.
That is some interesting research. Basically what they do is extract some blood, separate out some of the t-cells, plump up the t-cells and help them multiply, and then pump them back into you so they can take a whack at the cancer/tumour.
See, apparently tumours have this sneaky way of tricking your t-cells into believing there really aren’t any tumours there and so the t-cells leave them alone. This research is sounding interesting and hopeful.

It was interesting to chat with the women we shared a table with. One woman had just started her chemo treatments and it was a strange flashback to think about how that felt not so long ago, and to think about the fact that I actually made it through my 8 treatments. I am still working through that detail.
We chatted with 2 other women who had both been cancer-free for a good long chunk and one of them is now getting medals in the Grouse Grind, so that was really good to hear!
It was also new territory for me to be sitting with someone else who has/had ovarian cancer. I mean, I know it’s a weird thing to say, but I have never met anyone else in the flesh who had it, so it was bizarre on some level to be able to sit and chat and have that be accessible.
The women who were there were really kind to me and I appreciated that.

And I came away thinking I may want to devote some energy to being some sort of queer resource for people with cancer.
I dunno yet.
Who knows what happens next.
But I felt like there are some issues that have come up for me around the cancer process and those things are different than many of the things that would have come up for lots of the women at the conference.
I knew that ages ago.
And being there in Victoria kind of drove the point home for me.
So, maybe I will become some sort of GBLT cancer resource. I dunno.
I am certainly open to talking to anyone about that.
I mean, on one hand, having cancer kind of cuts through the differences between people.
And on the other hand, the way we organize our lives is different.
This is my new idea. I am just not quite sure what to do with this big idea.

And now I see that it is very very late, so I will take my flannel-covered ass to bed and see what happens around all this in the future.

people can e-mail stuff they would have left as a comment.

The address for that would be:

evilblog ‘at’ spikeharris.com

and, you know, take the word ‘at’ out and throw in the curly old @.

But you all knew that, didn’t you?
You know how much (more) spam I would get just by putting that address up there like that.

Anyway, there is a short-term solution.

And thanks.

As you know, today was my 8th and, we think, last chemo treatment.

I have a bunch of pictures from today and sometime in the next while I will sort through them and put them up, so people can get a sense of what happens, because I know I had no clue what would happen when I went for my first chemo.

In the meantime, while I sort through the stuff in my camera and the stuff in my head, here are two pictures to give a bit of an idea of how it goes.

The picture above is, well, it’s my arm. But I am betting you already figured that out. Those are just a couple of bags of drugs and shit that got put in me today. I had the IV in me from 8:30 am till 2:30 in the afternoon so lots of stuff went in my arm today.
If you haven’t done your part to bankrupt the healthcare system lately, you may be unaware that the wee needle in my hand is actually a sort of plastic tip. My understanding, and I don’t know for sure because I am always looking the other way, is that the plastic covers the normal stainless steel tip, and the put the two of them in ya, and once they are in, they pull the stainless steel one out so that you only have a light, bendy pokey thing in you. These things make a difference, especially after 6 hours.

This picture is just to show you what happens when they pour all that dope in me.
Basically, I pass out pretty quick, because they start me off with Gravol and Benadryl and that combo would knock almost anyone on their ass.
This is me, listening to Metallica with the San Franciso Symphony Orchestra.
I have this morbid ritual of listening to that disc, partly because I really like it, and partly because it is a really good disc to listen to on headphones because of how intricate the orchestra stuff is, but a big piece of it is to be able to listen to the Metallica song, “Until It Sleeps” which James Hetfield wrote when one of his parents had cancer. (I don’t know which parent it was, I have heard conflicting stories.)
Everyone seems to have their weird chemo rituals and that is one of mine.

So, that’s 8 treatments.
I came home all stoked that I was finished. And then I sort of realized that I am not really finished. I still have the part where I feel like crap.
And I still have the blood work and the CT scan and the meeting with the doctor, all this month.
And I have to build up my immune system.
And I have to get my blood counts back in the normal range and get rid of the anemia.
And I have to grow my hair and eyebrows back.

And I have to start going to the gym again.
Going back to work would be a good thing too, sometime in the new year.
And do at least a few of the things I told myself I would do when I get better.
If I win that lottery, I will be able to do quite a few more… because I had a lot of time on my hands and came up with some grand and expensive things to do when I get better.
watch for me hang-gliding over you, any day now.

Well, I do my last (fingers crossed) chemo on Friday.
Which means I had my visit with the oncologist and the clinical trials nurse today.
I confess, I have been stressing about it a bit lately.

So, Elaine and I went to the cancer agency and they took their standard 3 vials of blood, and then they took 4 more, bigger vials, because I agreed to be part of a study. In fact, I agreed to be part of a couple of studies and I am not even sure which study I gave the blood for today, but that’s okay. And it’s not even the end of it. I still have 4 more vials to add on to some other blood draw at some point in the future.

They took the blood and then we had an hour and a half before the meeting with the oncologist and the nurse so we hung out in the car and read.
I have started the Harry Potter series all over again and I can’t believe that J.K.Rowling isn’t going to have her 6th book out in time for Christmas but then, as a friend of mine pointed out, she doesn’t have to care about things like having her book out in time for all the Christmas shopping because everyone who was going to buy her book will buy it no matter when she gets it out.
Still, it would have been nice.
Anyway… we sat and read and then we went and met with the medical folks.

They weighed me and then I went back into the examination room and the nurse handed me a piece of paper that had the results of all my bloodwork since I started.
After a few moments of confusion on my part, she pointed out that this piece of paper had the history of my CA125 levels and that they are at all all-time low of 2.2 !!
I was stunned and started making little cheering sounds.
I asked the doctor if the reading would ever go to zero and he said no. He said that if they measured Elaine’s blood right then, it’s possible that her score could be higher than mine.
I asked if this meant that, at this moment in time, I am cancer-free, and he said yes.
He said a bunch of other things that I seem to be blacking out. I blame the chemo drugs for that. But I recall snippets like my ‘test results were brilliant’ and how he ‘couldn’t be happier’ and I think he had a ‘spectacular’ or a ‘super’ or a ‘stupendous’ in there somewhere but, like I say, I may be making that up.

And then we asked about the future.
First of all, I will still be doing the last chemo on Friday. Good test results didn’t get me off the hook for that.
And, he will be seeing me every three months for the next 2 years, and then every 6 months until I hit a 7 year anniversary of knowing him.

Still, I am pretty stoked.
I think it is still sinking in.
And I think it is going to take a while to get over how completely stressful and intense the last 6 months have been. I expect there may be a bit of a crash at some point in the future.

But right now, like the oncologist, I couldn’t be happier.

It seems that I have wee traces of hair coming back in. And that’s pretty exciting.
Oh sure, it may not be exciting for you, but let me tell you, it’s exciting for me.

And I have to say that through this whole process, my “Scottish eyebrow hair” has shown amazing stamina and just wouldn’t quit or fall out.
Now, back in the days of regular hair growth, I would, on occasion, have these wild eye brow hairs that grew with a mind of their own. My g-f refers to these hairs as Scottish eyebrow hairs and she would always rip them out by the follicle, with a huge amount of glee.
But it’s strange how even some mutant hair can end up on your own personal endangered species list. And so this little hair has remained while all the others have fallen to their death.

And now, as you can see, the other eyebrow hair is starting to grow back.
Now, the hair is probably in for a rude surprise when I go for the last chemo treatment next week, but I am hopeful that the chemo won’t do a total clearcut of my little hair sprouts and I can start rebuilding with a bit of a, dare I say, headstart.
That’s my hope.

On other fronts, I went for bloodwork yesterday.
That was sort of interesting and sort of funny.
See, I used to be on a 3 week cycle, so I would do a batch of bloodwork, and then the next week they would do bloodwork again, and the day after that I would get a chemo treatment.
At least that was how I was doing the calculations.
And then last time, they switched me to a 4 week cycle so that shifted things a bit. So, imagine my surprise yesterday morning when I looked at my day planner and saw that I was supposed to have done my first batch of bloodwork on Oct.29th and here it was November 2nd.
Oops.
So, off we went to do that.
Seems they want the blood 2 weeks after the last treatment rather than one week before the next treatment.
Who knew?
Certainly not I.

I also had an interview with a lovely woman from the Hereditary Cancer Research program. We had a really good talk about genetics and her research and the politics of cancer versus the politics of AIDS and her work and my work.
I liked her. She was great.
And, now I have to go get a bunch more blood drawn because they have to test me to see if I have the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene mutation.
Those 2 genes have been shown to “be responsible for some hereditary breast cancer and some hereditary ovarian cancer”
Anyway, I am going to have 4 more vials of blood taken at some point in the future and it will take them about 6 months to figure out if I am a carrier for the BRCA genes. And then I will need to figure out what I do next, because that would be a whole new ball game, and frankly, I am not completely ready to go there just yet.
But it *is* important to do this so my sister and my nieces can make the decisions they need to make.
I’d like to think that I got in this situation from standing too close to the microwave or from the nasty chemicals I was exposed to when I was treeplanting 20 years ago.
The idea that my sister and my nieces may have to deal with this, that’s just a totally depressing concept.

But it is going to take a while before I even let them take the blood, and then a half year to get the results, so if you want to know how that one turns out, you’ll have to stick around for the long haul.