It’s exactly one week since my little operation and time to take stock. The liver values have come down. They’re all normal, except for bilirubin, which is still a bit elevated. This will slowly fade over the next few weeks. The pancreas values are unexceptional. All went as planned. I was even released on Monday afternoon as my oncologist had said.
I don’t feel fully restored yet, even though the operation was endoscopic without a single cut. There’s something a little odd about my digestion, though I have a hard time pointing a finger at it. For a few days, I had a slight chest pain. This felt like something outside my lungs, something muscular. It’s gone now. What disturbs me a lot is my breathing. I have a hard time drawing in enough air. Riding my bicycle to work I have to go slowly, and even so I feel frighteningly short of air. This feeling returns when I ride back home – downhill.
In the worst case, metastases in the lung could be the cause of this. Alternatively, it could be the pleural effusion I’ve had for a while, water in the space between the lung and the ribs. The more water, the less space for air to fill the lung. Both explanations are intuitive, but I don’t find them convincing. The degradation of my breathing happened essentially overnight, right at the time I had the operation. It must have something to do with it. I’ll work with this hypothesis for the time being and hope things will have returned to normal when I see my doctor again shortly before New Year’s.
Is it all good then? The operation was a success but it fixed only problems caused by the cancer, not the problem of cancer itself. To see how things were moving in this infinitely more important race, I had a CT taken two weeks ago. You probably haven’t forgotten about this. On Wednesday, I discussed the results with my oncologist.
To make things short, it was as expected, though far from what I had hoped. The clump in my liver had continued to grow, as had the size of the pleural effusion, which can be caused by metastatic cancers in the lung tissue. There was no good news. The doctor filed the most recent therapy with EGFR antibodies under failure just like the previous ones. I was mostly disappointed that the fasting hadn’t made a difference. It looked so convincing on paper.
Here it is important to take a step back and look at the facts with disinterested eyes. The cancer has not been stopped. That’s a fact. As this is the goal of every therapy during the early stages of treatment, every therapy so far has failed. But this is a far cry from saying that the therapy hasn’t worked. Maybe it has slowed the cancer. Maybe the cancer would have raged more violently without treatment. This is almost certainly true, though there’s no way of telling.
In any case, a new therapy is needed to see if a breakthrough can be achieved after all. My oncologist wants to move away from 5-fluorouracil-based therapies. He suggested something pill-based, to be taken daily and at as high a dose as my body will tolerate. I will have to spend less time at the hospital, get fewer pins stuck into my chest and won’t have to fast, but I doubt this will make it easier. How am I going to deal with the side effects if I need to take the drugs every day? I’m not exactly looking forward to next year.
0 comments:
Post a Comment