Round three

Tonight is the last night before the third round in my battle against cancer begins.  Cycling metaphors won’t do anymore.  Two wheels can cause a lot of suffering, but this is bigger.  It’s physical now.

The first round was the operation, a.k.a. knife therapy.  I came out ahead, I think.  The cancer was gone, from looking at it.  It had taken a serious hit and suffered great losses.  The tumor was removed, the metastases had been scraped out, but I had also lost half of my colon including the appendix, my gallbladder, a bunch of lymph nodes, and my omentum.  The cancer was down, but it wasn’t out.

During the second round, twelve sessions of chemotherapy stretching nearly half a year, the cancer staged a comeback.  It recovered its forces and landed devious punches that I didn’t notice.  I was lucky they didn’t knock me out.  It’s clear that the cancer has regained the upper hand.

For the third round, I’m stepping up my game.  I feel at full strength and am ready to suffer for an eventual victory.  The first chemo program was easy.  This one probably won’t be.  I will start to fast for 80 hours from tomorrow after breakfast.  Two days later, they will start putting chemicals in my blood in the outpatient clinic at the hospital.

A few hours later, I will be allowed to go home, carrying a pump that will release more chemicals over the course of two more days.  The doctor recommended I break the fast only after 24 hours on the pump.  This means dinner on Wednesday as the first meal after breakfast tomorrow.  I will skip three breakfasts, four lunches and three dinners.

This is not for the faint of heart.  Three-and-a-half days of fasting wears you out.  It exhausts your body and drains your reserves.  I don’t have much to offer in terms of fat metabolism, but I will come through.  I’ve just stepped on the bathroom scale.  At 64.5 kg, I’m at my heaviest ever, 2 kg more than at the beginning of the first chemotherapy program.  My body has something to feed on for the next few days.  The cancer cells – being reliant on glucose and unable to moderate their frenzied proliferation – won’t.  They won’t be much of an opponent for the chemicals this time.

The chemo program that’s about to begin will again run for twelve sessions.  All things going according to plan, the last one will be in the middle of November.  I’m already looking forward to December, to a PET-CT that will show no pathologic activity, the cancer cells all purged from my body.  It will be a merry Christmas indeed.