The treatment

Well, first the good news... that awful inpatient chemotherapy regimen is kicked to the curb.  Also, no more surgery.  The bad news is that the reason they are dumping the radical chemo is that they are no longer trying to "cure" me.  From here on out they will only "treat" me.  The difference being that the goal of treatment is to slow the cancer growth and give me the best quality life possible in the time remaining.  I don't know how much time that is and neither do they.  It all depends on how I respond to the much milder chemo.

So that starts next week and involves intravenous treatment on Mondays and Fridays and swallowing capsules on the other days.  I'll do that for 2 weeks and then have a week off and then they start over.  Side effects include orange pee, tingly fingers, susceptibility to infection, possible affected hearing (high frequency loss) and nausea.  I get to keep my hair; and I'm the one guy who doesn't care about that!

Dr. Scott chose a particular treatment that mainly is geared for the esophageal cancer (proper name: metastatic adenocarcinoma) but also has some known effect on lymphoma.  This is the closest he can come to the two birds with one stone approach.  He explained how surgery on the liver is pointless because it is fairly major and would set my health back in the wrong direction.  The metastatic part of the metastatic adenocarcinoma means that the adenocarcinoma cancer cells are floating around my body like little spaceships.  Sure, they have set up a tiny colony in my liver but wiping that out also wipes out a good chunk of the healthy portions.  The chemicals are designed to kill the spaceships and the colony... or at least slow them down.

We still have lots of questions. Nobody really has both of these cancers at once.  And so we don't have an estimate of how much longer I've got based on averages.  Really I'm not ready for that kind of information yet, anyway.  But we now have a diagnosis and a treatment plan.  There is no known scientific cure so at some point we'll probably be looking at all the auxiliary treatments like special diets and miracle elixirs and laying on of hands.  Maybe science will come up with something new or perhaps I'll just plain confound the doctors and get better despite all expectations.

This news is not unexpected so we are not devastated today any more than we have been since all this began.  There was plenty of levity in the exam room as Alice and I watched Mary try to transcribe all the ridiculous, polysyllabic, chemical names and their effects as Dr. Scott rattled them off.

Afterwards, the three of us (Mary, Alice, and I) went to Yesterdog to see if a Cheddardog-plus-pickles-washed-down-with root-beer treatment would have any effect.  It remains to be seen.