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Chemotherapy #37 Crossing Off Another Option

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March 19, 2024 – Chemotherapy #37 Cancelled

Yesterday I had another CT scan to assess the progress of the Lonsurf/Bevacizumab therapy regimen, and the news from the scan wasn’t great: there is one new 1cm tumor in my liver, about 50% growth in two other tumors, and no change in two others. There was a 20% increase in the size of my remaining peritoneal tumor, but no increase in the level of ascites, or fluid in my abdomen. There aren’t any new organs affected by metastasis, which is a blessing. There are signs of stress on my liver, as my bilirubin levels are increasing.

So we decided to discontinue the Lonsurf/Bevacizumab and look into other options, giving my liver and bone marrow a bit of a recovery period since my platelets were back down to 47. There is a study drug I may qualify for, and a newly-approved drug called fruquintinib that we can try if I am not eligible for the study.

To be honest, we are running out of treatment options at this time, short of traveling to another part of the country (or to other countries) to participate in other trials, though I don’t relish the idea of working remotely and being away from home and family, especially for such slim odds. I think I would much prefer to be comfortable at home than out chasing rainbows. But I take inspiration from Thomas Edison’s great quotation about finding the right filament for the light bulb: “I haven’t failed — I’ve just found 10,000 that won’t work.”

More news from the bright side though, I am feeling very well although starting the Lonsurf again yesterday hit me with a deep fatigue that only hours and hours of extra sleep could make any better. I’ve also been able to sort out over a few cycles of treatment, that Lonsurf gives me constant low-grade headaches and a little stomach upset. It also raises blood pressure but with the changes in my diet my blood pressure has kept itself quite low (113/63), so it hasn’t been very noticeable.

In my weeks off I am feeling great, in some ways better than ever, and I’ve been delighting in the opportunity to get out of town and see more stuff that’s nearby. I am so looking forward to taking our train ride across the American Southwest next month. I plan on posting lots of photos and thoughts during the journey!

Here are some of the things I’ve been doing lately, that have kept me too busy to update the blog. Some of this stuff was busy work like preparing my taxes and fixing plumbing leaks, but a lot of it was very exciting and memorable.

March 16, 2024 — Ocean Isle Beach, Myrtle Beach, and Southport North Carolina.

We had an unseasonably warm weekend and although on Friday it poured down rain, I took a half day off work and went with my wife down to the Myrtle Beach area, where we got to have dinner with my niece BG and her husband BR. It had been way too long since we’ve gotten to see each other, owing to her mom getting a bad case of west-coast COVID and having to wave me off a weekend trip where everyone would have been up in Virginia at the same time.

We met at a nice Japanese restaurant called Ichiban and did some catching up. I am always super proud of BG and BR and I admire their drive and refreshing pragmatism.

We stayed overnight in Ocean Isle Beach at my sister’s beach house, where I always get the deepest, most refreshing sleep I can ever remember. I’m not sure why that’s the case, but it is quiet and peaceful there.

Though I suppose it wasn’t so peaceful recently at the roundabout in the middle of town — in North Carolina, drivers just can’t get the hang of roundabouts, and they tend to drive straight through them at warp-speed. This must have been a spectacular accident:

We had breakfast the next day at Sarah’s Kitchen, a very nice family-owned restaurant where the service is always friendly and the food is very good and expertly prepared. I love the cheerful blue walls and the decor. Then we went back to Myrtle Beach so that my wife could experience the Gay Dolphin Gift Cove, and she balked at taking the Sky Wheel because of the claustrophobic enclosed pods and long periods of time you have to wait for it to load and unload passengers.

We walked around the boardwalk area and took in some sights but we had to get to our next planned stop quickly, so we cut the visit short and drove all the way to Southport NC to visit the North Carolina Maritime Museum there. North Carolina has three maritime museums and I aim to see every one of them. Last year for my birthday I went to Beaufort NC to see the artifacts from the Queen Anne’s Revenge. As soon as it opens back up, I want to go to Cape Hatteras NC and see the third maritime museum, the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum.

After the museum we walked around Southport. What a beautiful coastal town! Lots of people walking, everyone was friendly.

There was a wedding about to happen at the community center nearby, the weather was warm, and the local pub was offering St. Patrick’s Day pints of Guinness on draft– which I couldn’t have because… you know, cancer in my liver and all. Sigh.

We built up an appetite and ate at Oliver’s on the Cape Fear, which was almost entirely reserved but they found us a high-top table where we could enjoy an early dinner.

Then we went to see the Oak Island Lighthouse at sunset. It was closed so we couldn’t go inside and climb up, but it was a sight to see and we got a bit of walking in, over to the beach, though the walk was cut a bit short by the urgency of my needing to go somewhere and poop — having half a colon can be really inconvenient that way.

We had a nice drive home to get my wife home in time for sleep and work the next day, and I got a free Sunday to work on taxes and get those out of the way. I also got to visit with Grandpa J and Grandma K, taste her Irish Soda Bread (fantastic!), and help them e-file their taxes too. Nice to check those things off!

The unexpected highlight of my day was dropping in on our friend SC who does energy work, and getting a treatment that absolutely neutralized my headache and abdominal discomfort, and I swear I felt lighter on my feet and bouncier in my steps afterward. Many heartfelt thanks to SC!

March 12, 2024 – Neil deGrasse Tyson

My wife and I went to dinner with my dear friend and Lunch Bunch member JC and her husband SG, then went together to see Neil deGrasse Tyson give a talk on Astronomy Bizarre at the Durham Performing Arts Center. It was informative, funny, and entertaining especially in the way that he helpfully explained for the young children how we used to have to turn a crank to open a car window, how we had to look up information in books in libraries, and so on.

March 9, 2024 – APA 8-ball Jack & Jill Scotch Doubles Tournament

I haven’t been in a pool tournament except for city finals, since my cancer diagnosis. I got invited by AM on my pool league team, to play in this tournament with her. Since I am rank 4 but play like a 5, and she is a rank 3 that plays like a 4, we figured we would give them a little bit of hell. I’d never played in a Scotch Doubles tournament so I was deathly afraid of fouling and playing in the wrong order, but in Scotch Doubles you have to take a shot, then your partner takes a shot, and it goes back to you. The players’ ranks added together can’t exceed 10, and as a 7 we were at the lowest ranking in the tournament. This gave us a little handicap advantage.

There were 64 teams and by crappy luck, the first team we played were two 5’s that ended up winning first place in the whole tournament, $2500, and a trip to the World Pool Championships in Las Vegas NV. The matches were very close but the other team beat us. It was a good showing, so we went to the loser bracket (modified double-elimination format), and played the other losing teams hoping to get back in the running. From then on we did really well, winning the second and third rounds, then finally losing in the fourth round in the game that would have brought us back into the fold with the winning bracket. I never thought we would do so well — placing like somewhere in the 20s out of 64 — but my teammate and I played our absolute best and worked really remarkably well together.

The next day I went up to Richmond VA to spend the day hanging out with my college friend RT, eating Cuban food, getting refills on my Penzey’s spices, and going to the Roosevelt for an amazing dinner.

February 27, 2024 – The Amazing Turtle Quilt

Today I got a package in the mail from cousin Diane. It contained the most beautiful turtle quilt made for me by her sister-in-law. Snif. I am so deeply touched by this gift — Niawen’kó:wa!

Since starting to take blood thinners and losing weight on a keto-inspired diet, I have been shivering with cold nearly all winter. It is so comfy to curl up on my recliner with this quilt keeping me warm.

February 20-23, 2024 – Sister Birthday Visit

My sister came into town for a quilting conference with her friend T, and I took us all to a nice Ramen dinner for her birthday celebration. The food was very good and I had ramen with kale noodles to lower the carbs. Not bad!

Some days later I came down with Norovirus and spent 4 days being deathly ill, ejecting liquids from everywhere… I don’t even remember Tuesday, I spent the whole day sleeping. I was super dehydrated, burst the blood vessels in my eyes while throwing up and looked a horrible mess for weeks afterward.

February 19 – Chemotherapy #36

Took Lonsurf for the first week, and the oncologists asked me to hold off on it for a couple days in the second week due to the norovirus infection, then I resumed it. We put off the Bevacizumab. The good news was that my platelets recovered to 150 right after this! Wish I could work out why. Some say it was the incredible amounts of sleep. Others say it was the heavenly milkshake I had, when I couldn’t keep anything else down but bone broth.

February 17 — Touring the USS Wisconsin

I had an amazing time leaving town on a solo trip to Norfolk VA, where I visited the Nautica museum (mostly closed), and had a guided tour of the command and control areas of the USS Wisconsin.

What an incredible tour! The ship is like a time capsule and your admission lets you wander practically everywhere on board for hours and hours. I took 17,600 steps and most of them seemed like they were up and down very steep ladders.

It was amazing, this ship was a portable city with guns that could shoot shells that weighed like Volkswagen Beetles for several miles and still hit within a 20 yard radius of the target.

I stopped in Williamsburg on my way home to pick up some Cheese Shop dressing and walk up and down DOG street, and around the campus.

February 3-4, 2024 — Winston-Salem, Pilot Mountain, and Mount Airy

My wife and I took some days away and got a hotel in Winston-Salem as a home base for some fun local tourism.

We started with dinner in Greensboro at Crafted: The Art of the Taco, where we found a great neon sign.

We stayed overnight in Winston-Salem and got a hotel that had an indoor pool. We tried to swim in it, but being on blood thinners everything is super cold to me, and it was too painfully cold to enjoy in the winter.

The next morning we drove to Pilot Mountain and spent some time appreciating the view from the top.

Then we continued on to Mount Airy, where we visited the Andy Griffith museum, and walked up and down the main street, stopping in some shops along the way.

We returned to Winston-Salem where we went to dinner at a fantastic restaurant called Mojito Latin Soul Food. I thoroughly enjoyed the atmosphere, decor, and the quality of the food. I wish this restaurant were in my own town, I would go there a lot.

We woke up the next morning and had breakfast near the hotel at a very nice breakfast spot. People in Winston-Salem were incredibly nice and helpful. I just got a wonderful vibe from every place we visited in town.

Next, we went to visit Körner’s Folly in Kernersville NC. Our town of Durham NC owes some of the popularity of Bull Durham to the efforts of Jule Gilmer Körner in marketing it. This magnificent and quirky 22-room home was a showcase for his furniture and design business, and is a unique and worthwhile tourist destination.

Next we went to see the largest chest of drawers in the world in High Point, NC.

We followed up by visiting Lydia’s haunted bridge in Jamestown, NC.

January 27, 2024 – USS Monitor

Feeling energetic on a weekend break from the Lonsurf chemotherapy, I visited the USS Monitor exhibit at the Newport News Mariner’s Museum. It was nice to poke through the exhibit at my own speed and study the artifacts there. What was amazing was how many reproductions the Newport News Shipyard produced for the exhibit — miniature working models of the engine and the CSS Virginia engine, a scale model of the USS Monitor parked outside, and various engine models from other ships in the miniatures exhibit.

I had no idea how luxurious the interior of the USS Monitor was, I guess I assumed it was an all-business-at-the-pointy-end sort of ship. There are cabin reproductions in the museum and it was very nice inside.

January 22, 2024 – Chemotherapy #35

Started a two-week cycle of Lonsurf on for five days, off for two, then on for five in week two. I noticed a lot of fatigue and the first few doses gave me upset stomach and nausea but things equalized and I felt pretty normal, though fatigued, for the rest of the treatment. The last day of treatment upset my stomach for more than a day, I was glad for the weekend off.

The Bucket List

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I suppose that every cancer patient has a bucket list. You really never know what is going to happen: you have quite a high chance of suffering a stroke or heart attack during treatment and ending up passing away, or you might get an aggressive mutation that lets the cancer spread out of control and it overwhelms your meager defenses, despite your best efforts to be healthy. But even if you don’t have cancer there are so many things that can end your life too early… do you have places you’ve always wanted to see? Things you always wanted to do? There really is no time like the present, when you don’t have any idea how many more turns of the earth you have left, to do something that you can look back on for the rest of your days with a smile and a warm, refreshed heart.

Here is a principle you can live your life by!

For many, many years I always have said I don’t have a bucket list, because I have been lucky enough to do everything I ever wanted to accomplish in my life: I have the most wonderful people in my life, my family and friends, and even if I haven’t specifically said it to you yet, I love each and every one of you. Love is so much more important than travel or anything you can own. The most precious moments I remember are meals and experiences shared with the ones I love.

My friend Kat once sent me a link to an astounding cover of a Megan Trainor song, Like I’m Gonna Lose You. I’ve since added it to my chemo playlist and the lyrics get everything right:

Show Lyrics

Part of me wants to just stay home and spend all my free time visiting with friends and family. And I do! And yet there is a deeply nomadic part of me that has the urge to wander the earth, because sometimes everyday life can be confining. As often happens in life, bills need to be paid, kids need to be fed, everything in the house seems to be falling apart around me and I barely have the time to patch it all together. It’s way too easy to relegate all your dreams to the back burner when you’re busy playing Whack-A-Mole with everything else.

There are so many things out in the world to see and do, and most of those things would be fun, but when the number of your remaining days is uncertain, it helps to prioritize those dreams; and perhaps the best way to do that, I figured, was to finally embrace the idea of a bucket list. Most of the things I would place on a bucket list are projects that would take hundreds or thousands of hours, and I have realized that to be on my bucket list, I would have to accomplish it in a very finite amount of time like a few days or a couple of weeks.

Really the most important thing on my bucket list lately was to visit my cancer buddy LP (and do so regularly), and I accomplished that a couple of weeks ago. It was all I had hoped for and more: an airplane adventure, good Cuban food, a bit of sightseeing, and the company of some people I love most in the world.

For my next stunt, there is one thing that my mind keeps coming back to. When I was growing up, with my parents and sister (and sometimes with our dog Tiny and my parakeet Hershey), we would drive all the way across the country whenever the U. S. Army stationed us in some new place. I remember in those days, while we chugged cross-country in our Volkswagen Squareback that we called Mildred, my sister and I would sing popular songs and show tunes until my parents’ ears would bleed and I’m sure they spent the hours praying desperately for us to fall asleep. But when we weren’t singing we did spend many, many hours just staring out the window at the cornfields going by, or the canyons and mesas drifting past, and somehow the experience of passing over the landscapes and vistas of the United States became some of my most precious memories. Even the memories of breakdowns and getting epically lost are good recollections, like the time we pulled off the road going up a hill in a snowstorm in New York state and the car had stalled and wouldn’t start again. My Dad was able to diagnose it was an ignition problem. He removed the steering wheel and handed it to my Mom, who looked down at the steering wheel in her hands, re-evaluated her life and said, “That’s IT!!! I want out of this marriage!” Fortunately she stuck with it and we suffered many many more memorable road trips together, full of show tunes, bee stings, rustic camping, overlooks, hikes, restaurant dives, hotels with broken air conditioning, even an urgent #2 bathroom stop in what turned out to be a homeless person’s forest bedroom.

There is a song I always associate with those road trips, it is On the Road by Carl Franzen performed by John Denver. It captures exactly the feelings of the lonely road, even with car breakdowns and getting lost:

Show Lyrics

Another great set of childhood memories for me was when we lived in Japan, we traveled by train to see Kyoto and Kamakura, and I just loved the train system, and the effortless way the trains went clanking down the rails past villages, gardens, forests, and farms. I thought at the time that Japan must have invented rail travel, since they had so many trains everywhere, and they had the fastest and smoothest train, the shinkansen.

I had heard before of the Amtrak Zephyr train that goes from Emeryville, CA to Chicago, IL over the course of two and a half days, with an observation car where you can take in the breathtaking sights of the American west flying by, and I always dreamed of getting a bedroom sleeper car cabin for two so that me and my wife could make the trip together. I also want to visit my cousins in Chicago and I have long wanted to visit the U-505 housed at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry.

It isn’t particularly cheap to travel in the sleeper car, as meals and stuff are included, so I imagined the expense would be achievable with just the two of us. But when I mentioned this dream to the children they were super excited to go, and I had to contemplate the expense of getting three of the 2-person cabins, and airplane tickets to California, and back from Chicago. After pricing it all, the cost was daunting particularly when dropping several thousand dollars on cancer scans and treatments, hitting my out of pocket maximum but also having to cover the costs of tests and procedures the insurance refused to cover. Honestly, all the expense meant that I kept the whole plan in my heart as a sort of pipe dream on the side, something that would be nice but probably nothing that I would get around to doing.

I can’t really express how shocked I was this weekend to log into Facebook and see our friend AW started a GoFundMe to finance the trip, and after our families did a lot of publicity, the campaign had already reached its goal when I noticed it. I was stunned at how many people responded so generously to make this trip happen, and my heart is full of emotion at all the prayers and good wishes I receive every day.

So many people offer us so much assistance, bringing us meals during surgery or giving us GrubHub gift certificates, which very directly helped me to rest and heal from my surgeries and treatments since I cook the family meals at home when I am feeling well enough and it gave me a well-needed break when I needed the extra rest. Some friends and my children have helped drive me to lab appointments or radiation and chemotherapy treatments.

It is difficult for me to accept the heartfelt charity of others. There are so many people I love in my life who need some kind of help from me, be it companionship in times of loneliness, to shopping for food and protein shakes for the homebound, helping fix home carpentry issues, fixing computers and technology, setting up networking, teaching people how to use their phones and bluetooth on their car stereos, assembling furniture, fixing minor car issues, and so many other things, that I prioritize all of these loving acts of service over time I would like to spend on my own projects. But there is no greater love than to pour yourself out for the good of others. I love the St. Ignatius prayer:

Teach me to serve as you deserve, to give and not to count the cost, to fight and not to heed the wounds, to labor and not to seek to rest, to give of my self and not ask for a reward, Except the reward of knowing that I am doing your will.

So I realize this is why I find it difficult to ask for or to receive anything in return. And it’s why this gift is so very special, not because I get to spend precious time on a trip with my family, but because the people I love wanted us to make beautiful memories together. I am incredibly thankful and my heart is bursting with appreciation!

The Forest and the Chemo that Wasn’t

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I tolerated my birthday chemotherapy very well, hardly suffering any side effects except some intensely burning poops the following Friday and Saturday as the chemo comes through my system. The steroid dexamethasone I took with the chemo tends to keep me up all night and screw up my blood sugars, but this time I did fall asleep and got about 5 hours of sleep before waking up. And with the low-carb diet my blood sugars are not as much of a problem, though they do peak up to about 123 — nothing like the 300s I was getting on a regular diet. Also the steroid gives me the worst crash about a day after I stop taking it. And because the side effects have been so low-key, I skipped taking Wednesday and Thursday’s dose. It made Wednesday pretty rough… I was so tired on my commute home from work that I had to focus intently or else fall asleep behind the wheel.

I took Friday off work to prepare for our summer vacation trip to Cook Forest PA. This year the entire family was going, which is exceptionally hard to make happen with everyone’s school and job commitments. The plan was to leave as soon as my wife got off work, maybe about 3pm. I puttered around and gathered our stuff together, consulted and revised my previous checklists, and prepared our minivan for the trip with an oil change and all fluids topped up. I found out at the last minute that my middle kid didn’t get off work until 7pm, so our new time of departure was around 8pm. It would be a late night drive to my sister’s house in the DC area. We were able to leave around 8pm and arrive a bit after midnight. Luckily no one else was crazy enough to drive to DC so late, and we didn’t encounter any significant traffic.

We stopped at an observation area in Maryland. Our middle kid wanted to stay in the car.

We spent the night at my sister’s place, my parents came over, and we all had a leisurely amazing keto breakfast. My sister made a great keto breakfast casserole that didn’t have potatoes in it; I have to make a mental note to get the recipe from her. Around lunchtime we departed for Cook Forest which is five hours by car if you don’t stop. Though we stopped in Altoona PA, about the halfway point, and had lunch at a Chili’s. It had been some time since we’d been to that restaurant chain, and the food was good, the service was incredibly friendly, and everyone left satisfied.

Lovely welcoming Altoona, thanks for a relaxing lunch!

We made it to Cook Forest in time for a great dinner at the cabin Aunt D. rented for the week, where we got to meet dozens of Grandma K’s family members we had not seen in at least a year. The neat thing about Aunt D.’s cabin was that it was the only place in Cook Forest that had a cellular signal. After dinner and fairly late at night, we checked into our hotel, some of us had a shower and got refreshed, and that was our Saturday.

Aunt D.’s Cabin in Cook Forest PA

The rest of the week we relaxed at Grandma K and Grandpa J’s cabin. I prepared keto-friendly side dishes that week like a Turkish-inspired salad with cherry tomatoes, feta, kalamata olives, red onions, cucumbers, parsley, balsamic vinegar and high-quality olive oil. I made some goat cheese guacamole a different night, and a sort of cole slaw but the mustard I had on hand was kind of spicy and it made the dish a bit weird.

Cruising down the Clarion River in perfect weather.

We had trips down the Clarion river in canoes and kayaks rented from the Pale Whale in Cooksburg, we hiked around the beautiful old-growth forest, and my middle child J. helped me deep-clean grandpa’s grill for the big rib dinner he always puts together one of the nights.

Our youngest son by a fallen tree in the beautiful forest.
Beautiful rays of sun made visible by smoke

I went along as co-pilot on a trip with Grandpa J. to fetch his 89-year-old sister, Sister J., in Cleveland to bring her back to our vacation. She is a Catholic nun who taught college physics in Cleveland for many years. Throughout the trip, I was exceptionally worried about the state of his right front brakes, which were starting to grind down the rotor and make noise every time he stopped or slowed down, and the Cook Forest roads are hilly and winding, and brakes are a good thing to have in those kind of situations. Plus, the highway department was blocking off lanes and pouring new asphalt, as evidenced by these mysterious signs:

Is it just my love of Mexican food, or does this sign promise some deliciousness ahead?

We made it to Cleveland, and Sister J’s friend, Sister P., made us a fantastic cold lunch of salad, cold cuts, cheese and bread. We had a couple hours of good conversation where I learned that Sister J. didn’t have much of a plan for how to get home. She said that Harriet Tubman often left her plans in the hands of God, and somehow she would get home too. It turned out in the end, after a lot of tricky back-and-forth phone messages from a region with virtually no cellphone coverage, that a friend came, picked her up in Clarion PA and brought her back to Cleveland on Sunday.

Luckily we found Sister J. in Cleveland, so this sign was on point.

We had a nice trip back from Cleveland with the brakes squealing on turns now, very concerning. But it was wonderful to chat with Sister J., and listen to her and her brother Grandpa J. reminisce and tell stories. We got back to Cook Forest in time to have a wonderful salmon dinner at Aunt G.’s cabin, and we brought along enough supplies for the kids to make smores around the campfire. I learned that the whole annual Cook Forest vacation and celebration is due to Sister J.’s suggestion, decades ago, that people meet there as a middle ground. It is handy that relatives and friends from New York City, New Jersey, Virginia, North Carolina, California, and Maryland (to name a few), can converge there and spend time together every year.

My wife and Sister J. by the campfire

The next day was preparation day for the Big Rib Dinner. It took all day to prepare, peel membrane off the ribs, marinate them, par-boil them, and I cut tons of garlic, ginger, and did anything else that was handed to me to do. Grandpa J. was under a lot of stress and worry, and prepared more ribs than ever before, so even with the support he was in a frenzy to get it all done. Then we heard there would be some very bad weather around dinnertime, so we went to the picnic shelter at Cook Forest Fun Park for dinner and pretty much the moment we stopped eating, a huge storm blew in with powerful winds and blew much of our stuff away, then deluged us with heavy, heavy rain. We had to abandon ship and leave a lot of stuff in the shelter and retrieve it early the next morning.

Congregating in the shelter before the storm.

After all the chaos, Grandpa J. announced this was the last year he was doing the rib dinner. I hope he changes his mind and just makes a smaller batch; we had leftover ribs for days (which is not a terrible fate).

At the cabin in Cook Forest, back row: Grandpa J., our fourth child J.H., Sister J., second child I.G., third child J.J., front row: my lovely wife, Grandma K, and little ol’ me.

Somehow on the way home, the bare-metal whining brake pad on Grandpa J.’s car got so thin it slipped out of the caliper and vanished into the night, making braking very difficult and treacherous. We had to find a local garage that was available to do the job. We went to Aunt D.’s cabin to use the internet and found a shop in Sigel PA that ordered the parts from my description of the problem and model of the car, and was able to quickly install new pads and a new rotor and get the car back on the road before the trip home. Thank goodness that worked out!

I have to make a side paragraph about this, but the people in Clarion, Cook Forest, and vicinity are incredibly nice and welcoming. Time and time again I was blown away by their friendliness and helpfulness, just a bunch of outstanding people.

So we drove back to DC on Saturday and stopped again in Altoona, this time at a famous spot called Al’s Tavern, which is well-known for its chicken wings.

We visited Al’s Tavern in Altoona for a late lunch. Fantastic!

We stayed the night again at my sister’s house and got to visit her and my parents a bit more than on the trip north. We had a fantastic huge spread of taco dinner with zero-net-carb La Banderita Street Taco tortillas, and my blood sugar didn’t spike at all. My sister takes such good care of me and everyone she loves, and I am eternally grateful.

The Chemo That Wasn’t

We got home in time for me to get my port accessed for lab tests and chemotherapy. My CEA was up a tiny bit, 7%, to 5.9. It’s not as bad as a year ago, when it was doubling every couple of weeks, and we just had a good 33% drop in CEA, so I was only a bit concerned about the increase.

CEA Levels

My HgbA1c was 5.7. My cholesterol was 152: LDL 41, HDL 34 and Triglycerides 465. I’m still losing weight and my fat cells are releasing tryglycerides into my bloodstream, so that explains the high value there. My white blood cell count was very low at 2.0×10^9/L (normal low is 3.0), my platelets were 57×10^9/L (normal low is 150). My neutrophil count was 1.0×10^9/L (normal low is 2.0). As such, my oncologist determined we should skip chemo this time and give my body a chance to rebuild its defenses. We also discussed whether we should go to 3 week cycles, as I have read on the internet that a lot of people doing low carb diet plus chemotherapy, are able to tolerate chemo better and live much longer on a 3-week cycle. We will move to that soon after the next CT scan results, if things look favorable for that.

I can’t complain at all about not having chemo, I was a little worried that my CEA was going to increase a lot without it. As much as you hate chemotherapy and its side effects, it is a warm comfortable blanket where at least you’re doing something to hold down the cancer, and being without it is stressful.

So from July 25 until August 8, I am free as a bird to enjoy life, get more exercise steps in, and build myself back up for the next round!