Notes to self

With my mom in town for a week – highly appreciated for giving us a hand and lots of fun as well – I have even less time to write than normally.  How do regular bloggers manage to blog regularly?  Unless I lie in a hospital bed, I always find other things to do, and it’s suddenly the middle of the night and I should go to bed, and nothing has been posted to let you know and help me remember.

On the one hand, this short and quickly composed post serves to dispel any concerns about my well-being you might harbor after three days of silence.  All is good.  I’m experiencing only the slightest of side effects.  My life is as normal as it can be.

On the other hand, it serves to summarize the conversation I had with the oncologist on Monday and the thoughts I’ve churned in my mind since then.  My oncologist is a young fellow.  He’s probably a good doctor but he hasn’t yet acquired the experiences that builds confidence.  He answers questions in great detail, as if the objective wasn’t to give an answer but an assurance of knowledge and expertise.  I got good answers in the first sentences followed by long soliloquies that didn’t add anything.  Here are the answers.

1. Exercise stimulates circulation, which in turn might help get immune cells as well as chemo drugs to existing tumors.  Blocking angiogensis (by Avastin, one of the drugs in my chemo cocktail) prevents new tumors from growing.  There’s no contradiction here.
2. Methadon is frequently given to all sorts of cancer patients at my hospital.  It helps manage pain but hasn’t shown a reductive effect on difficult tumors.  My doctor wasn’t impressed with the initial study that claimed methadon to help overcome resistance of tumors to chemotherapy (which I haven’t even read yet).
3. He had never heard of polysaccharide K but wrote it down to read up on it.  One interesting point he made is that different ethnic groups might react differently to pharmaceuticals.  What works in Japanese doesn’t necessarily have to work in Europeans, whether because of slight genetic differences or of environmental history.

My doctor’s answers were good ones.  They cleared up a confusion I had and reduced two possible magic bullets to interesting options to my therapy whose efficacy hasn’t been shown yet.  I’m happy with this.  Methadon and polysaccharide K might not do me any good now, but I’ll keep them in my mind for when things go bad.  I’m nowhere near this point and should, before long, find the time to read up on both.