Author Archives: Brian

Who’s got two thumbs and doesn’t want to go to Chemo today??

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THIS GUY!

On the plus side, this dose will again be without the bleomycin, and like I said last week, it seems to lighten the intensity quite a bit.

No word yet on the results of the lung function test. At this rate I would expect to not hear anything until we next meet with the oncologist in two weeks. At that point the decision will be made whether or not to put the bleomycin back in. Christine is pushing for me to just email the doctor and see what see says, but I’ve always been of the impression that “no news is good news” so I’ve resisted asking.

Still,  I can’t imagine that it would come back indicating that everything is fine. It doesn’t take much to get me “sucking wind” these days, and it’s more than just being out of shape. I’ve been slowly increasing the amount of exercise that I’ve been getting lately and I still feel like I’m always breathing heavier than I should. We’ll see…

Last night Christine and I finally hooked up the Kinect for the Xbox that Tanya got us for Christmas (thanks Tanya!) and we played Dance Central. It pretty much went like this:

Step 1: Hook up Kinect
Step 2: Insert “Dance Central” disc
Step 3: Close curtians
Step 4: Dance!

This game is A BLAST! It’s by the makers of Rock Band, which was a favorite amongst my friends and I for a few years, but instead of playing plastic musical instruments you’re following the little guy on the screen and performing dance moves. It’s good times. Though I can’t stress enough how important Step 3 is in the process =)

An Apple a day keeps the chemo away (or at least off the mind)

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Stine here. Yesterday was Brian’s chemo day, and it was made far more tolerable by the new iPad many of you so generously got for us. Have I told you yet how grateful we are? Brian spent almost the entire time on it, and from his perspective, the treatment flew by. I’m sure the Lorazepam helped, too, but he was able to sufficiently distract himself the whole time. So, one more time, we would like to say thank you:

The virtual thank you card!Here he is in the chemo chair, thanking everyone for the gift.

Even though this was mainly Brian’s toy yesterday, I had a little fun with it, too:

I couldn’t resist. =)

Sweating out chemo drugs

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Sweating out chemo drugs is not what I would call a pleasant experience. It’s most acute in the days immediately following and I’m starting to find it as gross as it sounds.

I don’t really know if it’s noticeable to anyone else, but to myself there is a very distinct smell coming out of my pores. It smells like medicine. Its during these days that I don’t like being in my own skin, but at least I’m not achy yet, that comes later.

What’s even worse, about flushing the drugs out of my body, is the way my urine smells. It’s not something you think you’d notice, but you do. I’m sure you wanted to know this. It’s the reason you visit my blog!

I most amazed at how fast it starts to happen too, one of the chemo drugs I take (Adriamycin) is the color of bright red kool-aid and if I go to the bathroom within several minutes of it being administered my urine is already red in color. To me that just goes to show how the body immediately identifies the drugs as something that shouldn’t be there and how the kidneys get to work immediately in trying to get rid of it. I try to drink as much water as I can to help the process.

Just some fun things for you to think about this weekend =)

“You mean there’s a 6 O’clock in the morning, too?”

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Stine here, again. Brian is in a series of late night rehearsals for a show right now (more about that tomorrow or Thursday), and because he’s getting home so late at night, you get the pleasure of reading what I write again today so he can get his beauty sleep when he arrives home. It’s probably not the last time this week, either.

Don’t worry, though. Brian will be back to talk to you in detail about all of his most peculiar bodily functions and the side-effects of cancer in no time.

Yesterday was a really long day for Brian, because he had to be in Bellevue at 7 a.m. for a CT scan. It’s amazing to think that it’s already been two months since his last one. I still can’t believe how quickly time passes when you’re living in two week chunks, punctuated by chemo sessions.

Brian had a really late night at rehearsal the night before, and got home at about 11:20 p.m., which as far as I can tell, is just before dawn.

For someone who already doesn’t have a lot of energy, I’m sure 6 a.m. came really early for him. In fact, he spent most of his time in the waiting room yawning:

Waker, waker, little mate!I didn’t have to wait long to get a picture of him yawning. In fact, it would have been harder to get a picture of him not yawning.

In between yawns, he grimaced at the two “venti” cups of contrast solution he has to drink before a CT scan.

Bottoms up!He really, really doesn’t like this stuff.

Fortunately, the technician gave him one cup flavored with banana, and one with wild berry. So, at least they switched it up a little for him.

The staff were in a particularly generous mood for such an early Monday morning, and they brought him two toasty warm blankets to keep the poor sleepy guy warm while he waited.

"I wanna go back to bed now."See how he can almost fall asleep in hospitals now?

The early hour might have had something to do with it, or his late night, but he was very calm, cool and composed. It was a huge contrast to the first time he had to go in for a CT scan (where we were both nervous wrecks, and wow was he sickly  skinny), and even the last time when it was still only our second trip to the rodeo.

We won’t get the results until we meet with the oncologist on February 3, so we are just going to put it out of our minds, hope for the best, and look forward to an early bedtime sometime soon!

“Hope is a dangerous thing…”

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I’ve avoided saying this out loud (and this is typing it, so it doesn’t count) and even now I don’t know if I’m going to finish this thought, or even post it if I do, but: I have this recurring fantasy/daydream that when we meet with the oncologist on Thursday, and we see the results of  last week’s CT Scan, that she’ll tell us that we can start counting down til my last chemo treatment… That the tumors are gone, and that I’ll be done in April.

This is really the first time that I’ve allowed myself to get excited, or to think about the possibility of being done with treatment. Up until this point, I’ve really REALLY tried not to think about it too much, choosing instead to not get my hopes up and to just take each treatment as it comes without thinking about where I am in the overall scheduled course of treatment. Any time I used to think about crunching those numbers I would always stop myself. “What if I’m only a quarter of the way there? Or, at best, halfway,” I’d think to myself. And to be honest its one of the most depressing thoughts that I’ve allowed myself to have. If I’m only halfway, that means that I basically have to again go through everything that I’ve already been though. That thought alone has been enough to stop me from thinking about it.

That is until now.

This week I allowed myself to count it out on my fingers. “October to November. November to December …”

As we creep into February we are now moving towards what could be the shorter end of the  “6-8 months of chemo” that I was told to expect. And now that I know this,  I can’t help but start thinking about the end.

I think about it now. I think about it A LOT.

I think about how good it will feel to be done. I think about the things that I might be able to do again as early as the spring. And I think about a time, possibly in the near future, when I can say that I HAD cancer.

I’m cautioned by a line that Morgan Freeman’s character Red says in The Shawshank Redemption: “Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.”

Possibly more accurate in this case is that hope can lead to disappointment.

See, there is a reason that I’ve started thinking about this. In my mind there is a chance that these CT Scan results will be good enough that and that the tumors will have shrunk back enough that we we’ll start talking about an exit strategy. What we want is a CT Scan that show no sign of disease and at that point the doctor will order my final two rounds of chemo (a total of another 4 treatments) and I’ll be done, six and half months after I started. I promised myself that I wouldn’t start thinking like this, but I’m just so ready to be done that I can’t help myself.

Now that I’ve started counting, I can’t stop. The downside to this is that I now know how long it possibly could be. If I don’t hear what I want to hear this week then it will likely be another 2 months until my next CT Scan, and assuming THAT test shows us what we want to see I’ll still have to go through that final 2 months of treatments, so that brings the next window for my final treatment in 4 months. At that point I’ll have been undergoing chemo treatments for almost 10 months. If that’s the case, it would mean that I’m only halfway…

I don’t know, maybe in the end Red was wrong and Andy Dufresne was right:  “Remember, Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies.”

I look back at the pictures from my first scans and in my mind the tumors look like they are at least half as big in December as they were in October. So wouldn’t that indicate that there is a good chance that now, another two months later, they are gone?

I hope so.