14 Feb 2025 Cancer Crawl
So today I woke up before 6am to get down to Mass General for my first infusion. As a bonus, I fell asleep with a stuffed animal next to me and later awoke with Carrie sleeping to my side, so that was awesome. She arrived “late” last night.
I have done far less reading on immunotherapy than other kinds of drugs and options, simply because it’s obviously the best choice for my heart right now, it might help with my lungs as well, and it has the fewest side effects. There’s also exhaustion factor: we turned over the radiation so much at first that I didn’t have a lot of space left for thinking through immunotherapy. So we just went for it.
Side note: I realize there are many opinions on this, but having worked with a lot of different kinds of cancer doctors, I’ve learned that I prefer situations where I can simply trust the doctor or group of doctors. That’s my method for reading reports, for instance, which appear sometimes instantly in the patient portal here, but are best interpreted by someone who is not me. The possibilities for cancer research online are potentially infinite, and my patient group has been great for filling in some of the blanks, but with big treatment decisions, at least in my case, there is something to be said for ceding control.
So, immunotherapy. As I understand it, immunotherapy tries to convince your immune system to attack the cancer but not other things. It can also attack other things, which is why a person on immunotherapy can become immunocompromised or have other issues, like the system attacking the skin or one of the organs. The other thing is that the odds aren’t super high that it will work. It could wind up doing nothing, but the only way to find out is to try it, so that’s what we are doing.
This morning’s appointment involved a meeting with my Boston oncologist, a nurse practitioner, a couple nurses, and a panel of bloods being taken. We asked a lot of questions and learned about the drugs. After all that, I headed up to the 8th floor, which is where they do chemo (“immuno” in my case I guess), and was feeling thankful that I was doing immunotherapy, which only takes about half an hour once you’ve got the IV in and meds ready. It’s just a bag of meds that gets mixed up, and goes in through an IV. So I guess it’s still less like tea and more akin to “makes its own sauce.” Here’s hoping.