It’s been a while since my last update. I didn’t realize
until I looked that it had been well over a year. Time moves strangely when you
have cancer, and it’s hard to believe how long it’s been since I last wrote. The
daily grind of fighting cancer, and the cumulative side effects just didn’t
have me in the proper headspace to write. Also, telling my story started
feeling like I was just complaining, because there was so much that was going
wrong. And honestly, life just got in the way. I was working full time while
doing chemo during the last year. Our 19-year-old cat Miss Kitty- who was a
great nurse to me- had to be put to sleep. We got 3 new kittens: Arya, the
many-faced cat, Alice, the Magician, and Vincent, the van Gogh. We sold our
condo and bought a townhouse (with sales falling through on both sides before
we got our current home), and moved. To end the year, I went on disability and was
laid off from my job of 18 years. All this and more happened in what I’d call
“normal” life, while the following happened medically.
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| When I would get home from chemo, Miss Kitty would be my nurse and make sure I wasn't alone. |
The rising CEA I mentioned in
my last post from oh-so-long-ago did lead to a recurrence. With Stage IV colon
cancer it’s not a matter of if it comes back, but when. A brief re-cap of my
CEA progress: My CEA hit a low of .9 May 3rd, 2015. From there it
slowly and steadily rose. I was still undergoing Maintenance therapy which
consisted of Leucovorin, Avastin, and 5FU, and wearing the pump for 2 days
after treatment giving me even more 5FU. By the end of October 2015, when the
latest CAT Scan came back with everything being stable, and my CEA still below
2.5, I was taken off the pump. By December my CEA had risen to 2.5, and the
Oncologist wanted me to get a PET Scan to get a better look at what was
happening inside me. The insurance company said no, but they would authorize
another CAT Scan. I fought as best I could for the PET Scan, being as I hadn’t
had one since September 2014. The insurance company said that they only would
authorize a PET Scan if the CAT Scan showed new abnormalities, or if I was
diagnosed with a different type of Cancer. Basically, they would only grant the
scan if I got worse, not as a measure to prevent me from getting worse. This
really pissed me off. This was a scan that my Oncologist, Surgeon, and Primary
Care Physician all agreed should be done for re-staging.
By the middle of January 2016
my CEA had risen enough that my oncologist put me back on full chemotherapy.
This time it would not be Folfox, it would be Folfiri. Folfiri is a combination
of Leucovorin, Ironotecan, and- the still aptly named- 5FU (Fluorouracil), and
I would again have to wear a pump of for 2 days after the infusion was over.
With this cocktail Avastin was replaced with Cyramza- a newer generation of
Avastin. All of the old side effects came speeding back, and the Cyramza had a
new one- flatulance. Yes, it is documented that Cyramza makes you fart- and
fart all the time. There was a good and bad of this. The good is that for me,
they were mostly funk-free. The bad- they were loud. I am sure there were times
I was lecturing in my Art History class where the students heard something.
I was on Folfiri longer than I
was on Folfox- approximately 8 months. The chemo brain was really hitting me
hard this time, with my wife mentioning conversations that I honestly never
remember having. In addition it was harder to just concentrate at times. The
other side effect that seemed to get exponentially worse was the fatigue. I was
constantly exhausted. Some days it was a struggle to get out of bed at all. In
August the CEA had gone all the way up to 5.9. That’s really not that high
relatively speaking, but it was rising while I was on chemo. This is where
things got even scarier. Full chemo had always helped control my disease, and
now it wasn’t. I was due for another scan, and this one showed one small lesion
on my liver. Now we knew what was causing the problem. What the oncologist
wanted me to do to fix it was something I had never heard of.
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| From left to right: Arya, Vincent, and Alice |
The oncologist sent me to an
interventional radiologist. What is interventional radiology? I’m glad you
asked- because I had to also. Interventional
radiology is a sub-specialty of radiology in which specially trained
doctors perform minimally invasive procedures to diagnose and treat various
diseases and effects of diseases- in this case the lesion on my liver. So I
brought my latest scan to the interventional radiologist and he took a look.
After consulting with my oncologist they determined that Radio Frequency
Ablation (RFA) was the best route to go. RFA is where an almost boiling hot
needle is inserted into the lesion, and then it and the surrounding tissue are
burned away. They Dr. is guided by the procedure being done in a CAT scan
machine so they can have pinpoint accuracy. It’s amazing technology! It also
has a very high success rate- over 85%.
The oncologist told me that
we’d have to wait a couple of months to see the full results, if there were
any. He was wrong about that- my next CEA already started showing improvement.
On August 17th, it was 5.9, by September 7th, it was 4.5,
and on September 21st it was 1.9. It worked! By December my CEA was
untraceable (<.5)- the lowest it had ever been. I was off of full chemo and
back on maintenance, and if things stayed this good, I was on my way to getting
an actual break from chemo- the first one in the three years since my diagnosis.
This was amazing news! I actually did get a break from chemo, but it wasn't what I was hoping for...
