Notes from Infusion 2 of 12

I just wanted to provide a brief update on yesterday's infusion.  Aside from starting late and ending late (we didn't leave until 9:30pm), everything went off without a hitch.  The drugs were administered as normal, the familiar side effects from the first infusion presented themselves yesterday (shaking legs, numbness, nausea, slurred speech).

One thing that was interesting and noticeable was the gradual decline of my energy level as it was offset by the fatigue as the chemo was administered.  I wrote down during the infusion that it was similar to the feeling of how you become more sleepy at the end of a late evening, but I could feel my body experiencing this change at an amazingly accelerated rate over a period of 30 minutes.  It's like the energy was being drained out of me like one of those life-sucking things from the Harry Potter movies (got a nerd reference in).

One last thing to report are the blood test results.  It showed my potassium and sodium chloride were just slightly below normal, but no big deal.  It did however, also so that the Carcinoembryonic Antigen (CEA) levels, one of the key metrics used to measure the amount of cancer in the blood stream, dropped.  The benchmark number was 99.5 prior to the first infusion (crazy high!), and we found that it dropped to 49.5 just before the second infusion.  While we only have a sample of one infusion, this is a positive result that is showing that the chemotherapy is working.  I am cautiously optimistic that this number will continue to decrease over time, anticipating that we may see a slight increase in the number between an infusion or two, but we should see an overall downward trend.

That's all for now, I'll update on bad how the side effects are over the next couple days.  Thanks for reading!