Pre-infusion lab results came back pretty decent this morning. I even have some red blood cells again!
I am still slightly anemic, and my liver enzyme numbers are a little unusual if you didn’t know my liver was recently torn apart and put back together, but nothing that concerns any of the experts. Kidneys are still doing their thing, so Backup Cancer is not doing anything scary at the moment. CEA numbers didn’t go down, but they also didn’t go up, and I haven’t had chemo for 2 months now so that counts as a mildly positive news item. All that stuff gets tracked for a few more cycles to see if there’s a trend before any fresh new hells are unleashed.
Tomorrow morning I go back into the loving embrace of the poison robots, and it will be a long dark winter and we’ll just keep going and going. I am not happy, but I am in a better place mentally than I was when this all started, and at least the poison is getting injected into a body that does not contain any large tumors (not counting Backup Cancer, which gives no shits about this chemo).
I am weaker than I was at the start, but wiser in the sense that I carefully documented the first 5 cycles and am armed with better plans and more tools to maintain an acceptable level of functionality and ability through the bad days. I will admit I let the past few weeks snap me out of the day-by-day attitude I had been maintaining before surgery and I forgot that I am not even halfway through the beginning of whatever we want to define as “the journey” through treatment of metastatic cancer.
It was kind of nice to have a break and be reminded what it’s like to not have chemo fuck up your whole being. I don’t suggest major surgery to most people as a vacation, but it worked for me. I will do my best to remember how I feel today as I grind through the next 3 months, and that will also be something that I didn’t have before, because I started chemo last summer already dealing with symptoms from the cancer.
Once again I want to scream from tall places how amazing my friends and family have been, and how there is no way I can imagine I would have been able to stumble through all the challenges without the support and love I have gotten from everyone. I have some fancy paper and some addresses and I am going to scrawl some barely legible sap at you, for real this time. I am especially lucky to have Ellie still standing by me and keeping me from getting derailed. I don’t know how to say everything I want to say about her. Me not words good. My only option is to stay alive and get my shit together so I can show her how important she is to me.
Happy Wednesday, my dudes!