Oh, For the Love Of…

December 12, 2008

Numbers went up, O Best Beloveds. 1450 or something like that, when it was 1300 last month. NP Lori said that it’s not uncommon for numbers to fluctuate at this stage of the game but a closer look at my history demonstrates that when my numbers start to go up, they keep going up until some other treatment (if any) brings them down again. This figures; Doxell/Doxcell/Whatever is a lovely chemo, one I highly recommend for all your cancer-treating needs, and so naturally I probably won’t get to stay on it. Probably, that is; Dr. W. can’t change my treatment for some weeks anyway, since I just had chemo, plus he’s at the annual Cancer Con in San Antonio, learning about new possibilities that may or may not apply to me. It’s possible he’ll let me have another go-around of D/D/W before definitively concluding its inefficacy. Even more likely is his latest nifty approach; molecular typing. Check this out; a small (!!!) biopsy is taken from one of my liver tumors, and this is subjected to some space age thingamabob that reveals what treatment it has responded well to, and, the best part, what treatment might work well in the future. This circumvents the “throw everything against the wall and see what sticks” approach. Cool, huh? Except for the “take a piece of your liver out” part. Anyway, he’s been doing a few of these lately, in his cutting edge way, and it does sound promising, and even exciting, except for the “take a piece of your liver out” part.

Either way, I won’t hear from him until after he gets back from Cancer Con, plus between the holidays and India–yep, we are still going, gotta see that Taj Mahal and give my paper–we might not be able to take the next step until late January. Meanwhile, Fay (and eventually Nichole) and I are in New Orleans, and Sarah is getting married tomorrow, and Paul Sanchez played last night with Shamar Allen and it was so so sweet, as was the churros and hot chocolate we had at the new tapas place Rambla and yesterday it snowed all over the city, and snow on the bayou just shows you something about things and how they happen and how you can’t anticipate but you can appreciate.

And that’s what I’m trying to do,