Lights on

After a barrage of posts earlier this week, when I was getting into the various options of continuing the battle against the cancer, it’s been oddly quiet for the last few days.  After the cliffhanger of the imminent visit to the specialist in Zurich, some might be wondering about updates.  Did the specialist have anything creative to share?  Does he expect a breakthrough?  The cliffhanger continues.

On Friday morning, I picked up a new projector to replace the one that stopped working six weeks ago.  The old one suffered from a broken powerboard that wasn’t worth replacing.  I found this out only after I had ordered a replacement bulb, waited for it to be shipped across several international borders in the middle of a pandemic, swapped the bulbs with no change in the output of light, and taken the projector to the local home electronics store, the owner of which told me the sad truth a week later.

In a time when Netflix is breaking its streaming records by the day, we were sitting in the dark.  In those six weeks, we watched one show on the screen that I use in the office, but that wasn’t exactly a cinematic experience, and we quickly agreed that it wasn't worth our time.  We sat out the lockdown without visual entertainment.  Now that the lockdown is over, the lights are back on.  And I have less time than ever to post.

Otherwise I would have written earlier that the consultation in Zurich was comforting, though it didn’t change the situation.  The specialist was as pessimistic as the doctors in Baden, but maybe slightly less blunt about it.  He talked about possible therapies as having the potential to make a difference.  He also rejected all of the suggestions I had come up with over the last few weeks.  Fasting:  Too dangerous, unlikely to help.  Trifluridine:  Overvalued.  T cell therapy:  Unlikely to work with colon cancer the way they’re currently done.  EGFR antibodies:  You’re better off with VEGF antibodies.  In any case, 5-fluorouracil does the main work during chemotherapy.  Changing the antibody won’t flip a therapy from failure to success.

He said all this with compassion and a quiet authority that left us none the wiser but oddly reassured.  I know things ain’t over until they’re over, and I’m ready to continue the fight.  I’ve started on the trametes extract and will try to do the fasting during the next chemo program.  The doctor in Zurich might not think much of it, but it’s a trick to pull, and I don’t have many left.