Cancer Crawl 8 Feb 2025
It was an absolutely exhausting week but in the end it’s not so hard. There’s a three page document that lists side effects and likely outcomes, and you sign it, and then they can radiate your brain. And it was so anticlimactic because I’d been around the block twice with the radiation oncologist (his tagline is “you never want to meet me professionally”), talked with two oncologists, and endocrinologist, family members, friends, etc. I’d talked it to death and then on Friday it was time to make the choice and try to kill cancer. And that’s what I did. I had no more questions.
I have an awesome mask that I get to take home with me when I’m done. They are now mesh masks which is a whole different vibe from the semi-plaster mask I wore in 2010 (TW: scary and/or hilarious mask). Very much “moving through a wormhole in the future” rather than “low budget horror film.” You’ll have to trust me for now.
The start of external beam radiation has been delayed to 18 Feb so they can make some adjustments–fine with me, I want them to get it right. It’ll be 10 doses, and I’ll start to feel the side effects sometime around the second five doses. Both times I went in the past — for 30 doses in 2010 and for 5 in 2024 — I did not bring guests except once for Carrie to see how it works. But I’m thinking about it this time, just as a social thing and frankly because this full-time cancer patient thing is a hell of a lot of work and it is wearing me down because having the symptoms is already exhausting.
For instance, this week I had appoints with physical therapy (twice), oncology, neurology, endocrinology, radiation oncology and radiology, and then on top of that I had two short notice meetings with neuropsychology. The first was to get a sense of me and my needs, the second was to run a 75-minute battery of tests including, I think, some of the ones that were administered on Donald Trump (name as many animals as you can that begin with the letter “L”). I don’t have the results yet but I can tell you my visual recall is for shit. You show me shapes, you take them away, I forget shapes. Words and numbers I’m just fine. This confirms my career choices not to become a painter, architect, or mapmaker. Or to try to draw cats. I may or may not be a very stable genius, but I have a baseline to test against in the future if that becomes necessary or useful.
If that’s not enough, I have two other doctors I imagine running around on hamster wheels ordering other tests. There’s no emergency to either but somehow I now have three different CT scans in the same week (because there’s also oncology). I am going to have to try to fix that. Happily, I have no appointments next week other than PT, which I love because it’s (usually) progress.
I know I promised more writing on the heart and it will probably have to come at some point. I don’t have much to offer at the moment besides the fact that there is a(n off-label) treatment plan that may or may not work, that treatment plan features a drug which involved old people on TV baking misshapen bread while a litany of side effects is read out, and I’ve never been on a drug that’s been advertised before. The plan has been approved, it involved infusions, and when I start doing it, I suppose I will want to write something about infusions as they are new to me. Unless we are talking about tea, which we are not.