Cancer Redux (pour mois, et vous)

Just a briefie (which is a written selfie, I think) to tell you that I'll be opening and drapes and dusting in here a bit to bring you all the news of cancer 2.0. Yes, I'm going back to chemo.

I suspected this a few weeks back. I simply haven't felt right, but I feared that I was heavy-handed in my self-diagnosis--there are other problems to blame that upon. Anemia, to account for my lethargy; lethargy, to account for my insouciance; insouciance, to account for my snarly bitch barely-hidden hate fevers--and so it goes.

But nagging at the back of me was the idea that simply a few cancerous cells escaping into one of thousands of lymph nodules could perpetuate my problems--and that was enough to make me see the odds were never going to be in my favor. I'm blessed/cursed with a powerful and aggressive bit of cancer, too--one that isn't about to give up because our romance version of the life novel tells us it must. It needn't, and doesn't; never good about rules.

In Cancer Reboot, I'm going purely chemo at least until it's proven effective or in need of help. My experience with getting more radiation in 8 weeks than a short order cook gets in a career convinced me that at very least, I've no more body to give the god of  the fry it religion of Anti-Cancerism. I need to regrow or at least patch the holes left by the last burnt rubber rally.

This time, there's a three drug combo, that will involve erbitux and taxol and another whose name I cannot remember. My oncologist thinks it's possible that I'm one of a group of people who find resistance with Cisplatin and heavy radiation. While there's no way to identify us upfront, I do wish they could have. I'd have knit a skullcap with my false hope, which I will apparently need.

Yes, this time, the hair does go. Just in time for solar daze in San Francisco, after a summer that was often, and blessedly to me, overcast. I walked a block the other day in the direct sun without a hat just as a test. I felt like it was true death time on True Blood. My dream of a Hawaii vacation, or Scott's dream of taking me there may have met it's match. Better I might visit Iceland in December, when I can be a shopping maniac skipping through the snowbanks at noon and feel naught but cold.

I'll start this new regimen next week, but in advance of that, I've had to put myself on a pain patch with a supplementary elixir. My first go round was free of actual cancer pain--once they had removed my horribly infected tongue, there wasn't much that actually hurt. This time around, nodules have grown on my chest that ache, tumors have developed in my underarms that burn and arche, my arms hurt, my back is killing me. Sleeping more than 2 hours at a time has been a luxury mostly denied. Waking at 2 for pain medicine is no problem--I'm usually up.

This time, it's definitely going to be different. Thank goodness that I do like challenge and change. Not that any cancer asked....