Delayed

Delayed another week. Saturday night my lingering cold became a bit of a problem. My throat turned quite sore, I got quite a headache and I developed a fever with no cowbells on hand to fix it. I peaked out at 100.1, just 0.4 degrees below the "you'd better head to the hospital for some IV antibiotics" threshold. A few weeks back my oncologist had given me a Cipro prescription "just in case" and he advised that I start taking that when we called him at 10:30pm. Sunday I got my white blood cell counts done and I was, as expected, low. Not critically low, but low enough to cause another delay in my chemo treatments. The Dr. came in said, "You're low, and your mom is going to kill me but I can't treat you this week." Sigh, I just want to be DONE! The biggest disappointment was, it was Father's day. My little girl Eva and my wife and devised a very fresh strawberry focused celebration that day. Eva is aware that my favorite dessert is Strawberry short cake and that I couldn't have any for my birthday (for the first time in probably 33 years) because my white counts were low then too. She and Liz planed to bake me a strawberry short cake and as an added bonus make chocolate cover strawberries, because, why not!?! Sadly, with low whites you've got to avoid fresh, uncooked foods. Bacteria hide out on everything and cooking them is the only safe way. They switched up to a strawberry peach cobbler, a pretty f'ing sweet substitute, and I promised Eva that when the summer is over and I am cured of cancer, we'd have a big party with all the strawberry short cake we could possibly want. I can't wait for that party!

Moar Hare

It is becoming a bit of a ritual at my house... Most nights as I put my youngest to bed, I sing her a little song, lean down to hug and kiss her and she reaches up to pluck a few of the few remaining hairs I have out of my head. I guess it is a cute and comforting way for her to participate in this disease I am living through this summer. I probably need to break the ritual though before too long, when my hair regrows and little Faye is yanking on my head getting pissed that the hair no longer just slips right out of the follicle.

Half way done.

Just finished my last bag of chemicals for round two of chemo therapy. That means I am halfway done with my treatments. It feels good.

The other bit good news is that Dr. said my tumor marker in my recent blood test were way down to undetectable levels, meaning that the tumor producing these aberrant proteins had been badly dammaged, i.e., the Chemo Therapy is working well. It is actually a pregnancy hormone that I was producing because my germ cells (the precursors to sperm cells) had started behaving like fertilize eggs instead of make sperm. The test results indicate that my tumor is mostly made up of the equivalent of placental cells, creating HCG, a female pregnancy hormone. 5 or 6 weeks ago if i'd bought and peed on a CVS pregnancy test I would have tested positive as pregnant, now, according to my blood test, I would not.

Biology is fascinating.