Number 5

TREATMENT #5
Folfiri treatment #5 went pretty well. My appetite came back on Thursday and I’ve been eating a few extra meals each day since. Di and I went to Chicago this weekend to see Dirty Dancing on stage at the Cadillac Palace Theatre and spend an afternoon at Ikea. Ahhh…retail therapy. :) We had planned that the trip would fall on the end of my recovery week so I’d have lots of energy but my bonus week after treatment #4 kind of messed up the timing a bit. Even with my lack of energy, we had a great time and the show was lots of fun! Di said that my energy lasted a lot longer than she expected it to last. We even made it out for a late night frozen yogurt run.

The bonus week between treatment #4 and #5 let my neutrophils recover to a level that was good enough for chemo but Dr. Huie decided that I would need to have Neupogen shots to (hopefully) prevent them from dropping so far this time. This brings us to another new experience on my journey…I learned how to give myself shots. Now, I’m not overly scared of needles at this point in my life but I have to admit that the thought of poking myself was not something I was looking forward to. I YouTubed the hell out of giving yourself a Neupogen shot before finding the courage to actually do it. In the end, it was a piece of cake. I gave myself shots for four days in a row and only one of them hurt. :)

LOOKING FORWARD
We are going to continue with Folfiri for another three treatments and then evaluate how well it has worked. We are obviously hopeful that it will do its job and the reality is that if it does, we might be able to avoid more treatments for a while. Even so, we know that we need to start planning for what the next treatment will potentially be...This is where it gets a little complicated. Once I’m done with Folfiri, I will have gone through the available standards for colon cancer treatment. To be clear—This does NOT mean that we are out of options at that point, it just means that we start doing a lot more mixing and matching to find something that sticks.

We are going to improve those odds by ordering a genome profile of my tumor. This should give us a better idea of what drugs will and will not be beneficial to me in future treatments. I’m excited because this has the potential to identify other cancer drugs that might work for me, even if they aren’t currently used for colon cancer. The test identifies specific defects in my tumor and matches them to pathways that cancer drugs use to attack. For example, there might be a drug that is designed to attack a breast cancer tumor a specific way…If my colon cancer tumor shares a similar defect, there is potential that the same drug could be effective on my tumor. This is our first time dipping toes into water that doesn’t fall within the “standards of care” for colon cancer.

I am thankful that this is a recovery week. I will get to be back at work; the kids (and Di) will get to be back at school; this week should resemble an almost normal week of life!

Thanks for checking in!