Over the past year and a bit, as I’ve been struggling with cancer, undergoing first a fairly substantial resective surgery and then three chemotherapy programs, I’ve always told anyone who asked that I was doing fine. This was generally true. I felt good. The disease seemed far away. There were only a few episodes when I was doing poorly. They passed quickly. I don’t see myself like this anymore.
Over the last week or so, I haven’t been doing too well. It started after the intervention to implant the stent into my bile duct, but probably had nothing to do with it. A few days later, water started accumulating in my lung at a frightening rate. Twice it was drained, and twice it didn’t make much of a difference. The liquid must have returned quickly.
With lungs at half capacity, I get out of breath more easily, and my heart rate goes up quickly. I feel no persistent pain but discomfort emanating from all parts of my body. Sometimes it even seems muscular. Every now and then, sharp pain shoots through my abdomen. How can this be? I am not happy with how things have recently progressed.
Yesterday morning, I filled my prescription of the new chemotherapy agent, trading 3500 Fr for 85 little pills that should last three weeks if taken at full dose. The doctor recommended taking it easy at the beginning and watching the side effects. The way I feel right now, side effects are the least of my worries. When I see my doctor again on Wednesday, I hope we can crank up the dosage. The cancer needs to feel the heat.
Last week, when I was wondering how my physical state had deteriorated all of a sudden, I was as idiotic as these TV epidemiologists in Switzerland that declared themselves complete shocked by the sudden start of the second wave of corona infections in October. There was nothing mysterious about the sudden rise of cases, and there’s nothing mysterious about my physical deterioration. Both a pandemic and cancer are developments based on exponential growth. If nothing is done to contain them, they will explode. I hope Switzerland has now learned this. I certainly have.
Even as little as a few months ago, I was myself. I know I was fighting cancer, but I couldn’t really feel it. This is a great place to be. Now, during the four week break since the end of the last therapy, the cancer must have taken advantage of a body free of drugs and proliferated, spread and done damage. I can feel the seeds of destruction inside me. I feel myself falling apart from the inside.
The new drugs are third-line therapeutics. They are prescribed when a bunch of other, statistically better therapies have failed or nor shown enough of an effect. One could take this as a rather depressing development. Luckily, statistics mean nothing at all for the treatment of an individual. Whether a drug works in one out of a hundred cases or helps one in a million is important for clinical trials, but makes no difference at all when treating an individual. Statistics break down when you’re looking at a sample of one. The thing that matters is that you’re the one where the drug works, not how many it doesn’t work for.
Over the course of this week, my doctor kept advancing the potential start of the new therapy. First, he was going to give me the prescription next Wednesday. Then he recommended I start after the Christmas weekend. The last I heard was Sunday. I took the first pills on Friday. There’s no point waiting. I believe I’m one in a million and the drug will work. There is no other approach.
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