Since the last post we've been doing chemo on a reduced schedule of one week on followed by two weeks off. It doesn't give me so much fatigue although it is still present to some degree.
About a month ago I started getting the pain in my abdomen again. Seems like it has gotten a little worse and now I can feel it most of the time. I'm also getting lots of mucous and phlegm in the back of my throat. I imagined that both are caused by the small tumors called adenocarcinomas in my lungs. The literature says that they are the cause of increased mucous.
With these new symptoms, the doctor ordered another CT scan which we did on Wednesday of this week. The results were mixed. In terms of the lung lesions, some are smaller, some are unchanged, and some are larger compared with the last scan in mid-April.
Other areas, such as the adrenal glands and liver, were really no different. And there were no tumors in new areas.
That means there was nothing on the scan which accounts for the pain in my abdomen or increased phlegm in the back of my throat. The blood tumor marker continues to decline which adds to the "mixed" nature of the results. The results just weren't very conclusive.
We decided to add an oral chemo drug and see how that goes. They need to work with the insurance and maybe the drug company to get this approved since it is never on the formulary. Others have been successful in getting the drug company to provide it without charge when insurance won't budge. It might take a week or two to find out. The other option was to increase chemo frequency, but that has the downside of doing blood transfusion every month or so as well as increased fatigue which really drops the quality of life overall.
We do chemo again next Friday. When we questioned the doctor about other options that he might have up his sleeve, he seemed pretty hesitant to put me in the clinical trial for immunotherapy. They are in a "pause" with that right now doing some intermediate analysis of results. Because of my 40+ year history of ulcerative colitis (an auto-immune disease), he feels that the side effects might be really debilitating and not worth it. We might talk more about that. The doctor also wondered if we would want to go for a second opinion about treatment, but I'm not sure it would yield any new options since we're already going to one of the premier treatment centers in the country.
In terms of the burn on my abdomen, we had our last visit to the Burn Center about six weeks ago. We did the twice daily dressing change for a couple of weeks and now I just put lotion on it twice a day to keep it from drying out and cracking the new skin that's growing over the wounded areas. So that is slowly getting better. It still looks pretty bad since it is bright red. That doctor said it might take a year to blend back into my skin color.
As always, we want to thank everyone in my vast support system for their thoughts, prayers, e-mails, text messages, phone calls, and acts of service on our behalf. I know there are many that I do not even know about. This means a great deal to us and I know it helps a lot for me to keep a positive outlook even though things seem a little bleak. Thanks so much.
