Drip Coffey

And back we go to chemo!

This is the tool most necessary to settle physician disputes.

Today was the fifth of Karen's six scheduled treatments and it went much better than the last one. Most probably because our oncologist pulled one of the drugs from the infusion: Avastin. It was during the Avastin portion of her treatment three weeks ago that Karen began experiencing the pain that signaled the galloping arrival of her colitis. Now, while the GI guy who treated Karen at the hospital full-on blames the Avastin for everything our oncologist, Dr. Sherman, is less definitive. And we kind of knew that was coming because Dr. GI Guy basically told us that "Your oncologist won't believe this."

And Dr. GI Guy was right. Sherman was kinda dismissive of the idea but he still pulled the Avastin because, well, it's complicated. There is no real correlation between plain old colitis and Avastin but the drug does affect your blood vessels (it fights cancer by killing off and preventing the growth of new blood vessels that spring up to keep the tumors fed with blood). Therefore, there is a slim chance it can cause ischemic colitis by killing the blood flow to the colon. Also, there's a chance that a blood clot--and Karen has a history of clots now--could have caused it as well. And thus, no more Avastin just to play it safe.

That better safe than sorry approach was just fine with Karen. While chemo is stressful under what you might laughingly call "ideal conditions" it's a lot more stressful when you're afraid it's going to knife you in the guts. Karen started dreading today's chemo a few days back, worried that she'd have a repeat performance of Treatment Number Four's ugliness. Not so today...she napped through most of it while I worked on my laptop next to her.

So now we wait. In three more weeks Karen will have that last infusion and sometime thereafter she'll have a PET scan to see if the chemo is doing any kind of good. If so, she'll transition to maintenance chemo which will be just one drug (Alimta) pumped into her every three weeks.

In anticipation of that, Karen is likely to get a port installed. There's a picture of what a port looks like just over there. Take a peek. This lovely apparatus will allow the docs to more easily deliver drugs into Karen whose veins are just about shot from all the IVs and blood draws. It will also bring her one step closer to becoming a cyborg so that's pretty awesome. Unless she goes rogue and kills us all. Less awesome, that.