Another New Normal

Today officially marked the beginning of maintenance chemo. Compared to the previous chemotherapy regimen--particularly the Avastin colitis nightmare--this was a total breeze. I ought to know--it didn't happen to me.

Karen's port is just a little less intrusive than this one.

At any rate, the chemo session was delightfully short, taking only about an hour from start to finish. This is one of the great benefits to going down to just a single therapeutic drug. Not only are we sidestepping the lengthy infusions of the other drugs but we're not having to sit through the administration of the additional meds that go along to make those drugs more tolerable. No more Emend, etc.

The chemo experience was also made less unpleasant thanks to Karen's brand new port. She had it put in last Thursday and while it was still sore today, it was good to go for her treatment. The port "lives" under her skin in her upper right chest. To access it, the nurse administering the drugs simply attaches an IV coupling to the port, then hooks up the IV to that coupling and away we go. Instead of hunting for a good vein--and Karen has basically just about run out--the nurse only has to plug the needle into the port. The port is already attached to Karen's circulatory system into a vein I forget the name of.

Post-zombie apocalypse childcare at its finest.

And now we just, well, coast. This is yet another new normal and while it's not as great as the grand old days of Crizotinib, it sure looks better than regular chemo (even though it adheres to the same Every Three Weeks schedule). We can expect to wring about 6 to maybe 12 months out of maintenance chemo assuming all goes well. So it's another anniversary, another Festival of Pies, another Christmas, another lots of things.

Looking ahead: Karen will have an MRI in a week to check in on the growths in her brain.

Looking back: Karen grew tired of the patchy Medusa look the chemo had left her with so she cut off most of her hair. She did not shave her head. Which is probably good because I have my doubts about her ability to pull that look off. The end result is pretty good, leaving her looking kinda like Carol from the Walking Dead. Ideally, she will not instruct our kids to "look at the flowers."

And God forbid she tell them to make flowers. Eep. I just made my skin crawl.

Trying to Maintain

Of course, our doctor and nurse practitioner are both on vacation this week, the very week we get the PET scan to determine if Karen's chemo is working. Less expected, our NP directed the oncology office to contact her if any of her patients' test results came in. So we got Karen's results via a beach somewhere in Mexico.

And it appears the chemo is working. While there is still metabolic tumor activity, there is no growth or metastatic activity. So now Karen will transition into maintenance chemo. She'll be sticking to the same schedule of getting infusions every three weeks but the med mixture will be limited just to the Alimta. We are hopeful that the more stripped-down medication regimen will make her recovery period shorter and less unpleasant. She'll continue with this course of action until we see evidence of it no longer being effective.

This also means that Karen will go ahead with getting her port, uh, installed. That will happen sometime next week, giving her just enough time  to recover from the minor outpatient surgery to have the oncologists jack into that port for her first maintenance chemo treatment on the 28th.

To celebrate, I'll be taking Karen to the weed store this weekend for their big 4/20 gala. See you at the Berkeley Patients Care Collective!

Waiting Around

It's been awhile since I've posted here. While I generally try to wait until we have something worthy of remark to post, I've been getting prodded to update regardless and, well, so here I am.

There's no real news to log here. That will come later in the week. Karen's last of the initial six chemo rounds went about as expected and she is starting to bounce back. Still, every recovery gets a little tougher. The three weeks are just enough for her to recover but not quite fully. So she's starting each round just a shade weaker than the preceding one. But she's hanging in there.

Pure. Sexual. Magnetism. oh yeah.

The news we'll be getting later this week will be the reading on her latest PET scan. That took place this morning. For the first time, Karen decided to stick around and get the DVD they make for you. The DVD comes with a PET scan reader program and allows you to review all the images and navigate through the various anatomical locations. It's actually pretty freaking cool. We reviewed the images as best we could but since we don't have the images from the scan before this one at home, we cannot really compare them to figure out how things are going. We are, after all, decidedly not doctors. We have some idea what to expect later this week but, really, we're just making half-educated guesses. I'll hold off on posting PET scan stuff until the experts weigh in.

In the meantime, Karen has lost more hair and now sports the hairline of funnyman Billy Crystal. Though, honestly, can we really refer to him as "funnyman" after My Giant? The good news, aside from the hairline she has not adopted the constipated tortoise visage of Mr. Saturday Night. So she's got that going for her.