I taught university level courses in sociology and criminal justice for over 30 years but now I'm retired and at 72 was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, bone marrow cancer. This site is now a chronicle of my journey with myeloma.
Yes, lassitude, which the dictionary that Apple so kindly provides for us as part of the operating system on my computer defines as: “a state of physical or mental weariness; lack of energy.” That about sums it up.
I know my expectations for myself are way out of whack. I keep forgetting the basic realities of my life: I’m almost seventy-five years old, I have a slow acting, but debilitating cancer and chemotherapy designed to fight said cancer that has side effects I’ve already discussed on this blog at nauseum. No need to flog a dead horse (as they say). I also have some neck issues that most people of my age get but that don’t afflict all of us in this demographic with pain. We won’t talk about arthritis now, shall we?
So, I’m tired and generally not feeling that great. What should I expect? Duh!
The past month has been especially unpleasant. My computer tells me that I’ve spent about nine hours a day of screen time. That seems about right. I’ve watched a lot of YouTube videos on everything from sailing to boat building, to prospecting, art, art history, lumber manufacturing, bushcraft, the La Palma volcano, people living alone in off-grid cabins, American Congressional politics, and more. Nine hours a day. It’s true that I also read quite a few articles from The Guardian, The Tyee, NPR, the CBC, and lots of internet-based news sources. And I’ve written a bit too. Still, I do a lot of sitting in my recliner, staring at my computer screen. I often think about things I could be doing like drawing, painting, woodwork, etcetera. Sometimes I do these things, generally followed by increased pain in my back and legs. That doesn’t encourage me to do more things. In fact, it actively discourages me from doing things. So, I go back to my recliner for another few hours. This pattern seems to be my fate now. I’m not sure I can do anything about it either.
Today is Sunday and this week is my chemo week. This is the fourth week in my monthly cycle and for the fourth week I don’t take lenalidomide, a drug I would normally take daily. On Thursday I take dexamethasone, valacyclovir, montelukast, and get one and a half hour of a Daratumumab infusion. That’s all no big deal. However, the effects of these meds will leave me feeling like I’ve got the flu for at least a week after.
Tomorrow, I have to go to the lab for blood tests. So, VIHA has now closed all satellite labs in the Valley leaving only the lab at the hospital. There used to be three satellite labs, one in Cumberland, one in Courtenay, and one at St-Joseph’s hospital. All gone now. Apparently, VIHA can’t find enough staff. There are no appointments to be had either for tomorrow, and I need lab results tomorrow to be able to get my infusion on Thursday. I may spend the better part of the day tomorrow at the hospital waiting to get my blood tested. That will not put a smile on my face. But, we’ll see. I’ll report back on my next post.
Do I sound like I’m complaining and whining? Well, I am.
What do I want to do with this blog? The thought crossed my mind that just giving up on it would not be the worst-case scenario. I’ve been at it for a few years now so it wouldn’t be outrageous for me to either quit entirely or maybe just take a break over the summer. Mygawd, I’m not making any money writing it. Lots of bloggers make money on YouTube with their blogs. I don’t, so what’s the point? Maybe I could monetize my blog, attach it to a video log and turn it loose on YouTube. After all, we DO live in a capitalist society. Might work. Probably not.
The weather has been wonderful lately if you want to lay about on a deck. I sit on the deck close to the rock/fountain and watch the birds come down for a drink. The one in the video here is a female goldfinch we think. She flits around avoiding direct contact with the fountain. It would probably knock her over if she did.
The wisteria gives them some shelter and protection before they come down to the fountain, but they’re still wary. Smart birds. There are cats prowlin’ around here. Our princess is one of them and she’s a hunter sometimes, mostly mice, but we don’t want to tempt her with birds. She’s being such a brat lately. She seems to have figured out exactly when I’m just about to fall asleep, then she pounces on the bed, meowling like crazy and poking my face with her paw.
Tilly has been hanging around the pond a lot lately. She patrols the perimeter sniffing around trying to get frogs to abandon their rocks along the shore. I don’t like the way she’s been fixated on frogs lately. She come close but she hasn’t caught any yet. I’d be very pissed off if she did. She spends most of her time under the deck these days where it’s cool. She’s got such a thick black coat she must really suffer in this heat, but she never complains.
Got a call from my Oncology GP this morning. He noted that my bloodwork is coming back from the lab within reference ranges (normal). Tomorrow I go to the hospital for another infusion of Daratumumab. After that, I don’t get another one until the end of August. As of this month, I’m down to once a month for the Dara. I keep taking my regular chemo meds, lenalidomide and dexamethasone, three weeks on, one week off. So, I’m in a weird space where I have no myeloma detectable in my blood, but I’ll be on chemo for the foreseeable future, that is, until the drugs don’t work anymore. At that point they’ll put me on another regime. That means that I must be vigilant around the side-effects of the chemo. It’s not always easy to tell chemo med side-effects from pain med side-effects.
For an old man, I’m feeling pretty good these days for about fifty percent of the time. I’m sleeping moderately well most of the time, but I have wakeful nights periodically. My neck is what’s tormenting me the most these days. According to my Oncology GP I have OAD (Old Age Disease). I can’t turn my neck more than 3% left or right. Maybe 4%. Makes it hard to do shoulder checks when I’m driving. Of course, I still drive. What are you thinking? I just have to turn my whole body when I do a shoulder check. That’s fine.
Technically, I have degenerative disc syndrome and it’s common among older people. I’m getting a CT scan early next month to confirm the diagnosis. Once I get the scan, I can ask my GP for a referral to someone who might be able to do something for me. That would be good. If I do get some relief, I’ll be able to do more writing, and maybe some sculpting. I’d love to do a bit of printmaking too. Or maybe I could just lie on the couch more comfortably. That would be good.
#77 Mid-February. Snow blankets the property but thankfully it didn’t fall when I was scheduled for chemotherapy at the hospital. It looks like it is respecting my hospital schedule of appointments. My next appointment for chemo is on the 18th, Thursday. I was successful with my first dose of chemo drugs last week, but there was a glitch in my chemo dates. I developed a fever on February 2nd in the afternoon. My temperature reached 39˚C on the 3rd. One thing we are told over and over again as myeloma patients is to go to the hospital if you develop a fever at all. So, off to the hospital I went. I ended up in the Emergency department for a day or so before they wheeled me up to D3, a ward on the third floor of the hospital. Thankfully I wasn’t there long. My docs tried to figure out what caused the fever, but they weren’t successful. They pumped me full of antibiotics in case of sepsis, a very reasonable thing to do. I developed some cellulitis in my right ankle, but that did not prove to be the source of infection. It may be that the fever was a product of a random myeloma issue. One thing is certain. I do not want to repeat that hospital experience.
What the Emergency Department interlude produced was a delay in the start of my second round of chemo. Turns out I started with the first full day of infusion on February 11th followed by a slightly shorter day on the 12th. I was supposed to start this course of therapy on February 3rd.
I’m not sure what to think at the moment. My first dose of daratumumab infused was successful. I had only a slight reaction to it. That’s really good. I hope the rest of the daratumumab infusions go as well. If they do, after having weekly sessions for a couple of months, then bi-weekly ones, I end up with infusions once a month for as long as this cocktail of daratumumab, lenalinomide and dexamethasone works. I’m hoping for a long respite from active myeloma. Of course, as I’ve often repeated, myeloma is incurable, but it is treatable. Given all the challenges I face, I’m determined to make my 80th birthday, that’s six years from now.
For the time being, my hospital visits for daratumumab infusions regulate my life. It’s really not so bad. The nurses in the Cancer Care facility at the hospital are great and make me as comfortable as possible for my infusions. One thing that may throw a wrench in the works is the very likely possibility that I will need radiation therapy on my jaw. I will have to travel to Victoria for that. I consult on the phone with a radiation oncologist tomorrow morning. I’m not sure what we can accomplish on the phone, but it’s a start. The pain in my jaw is pretty insistent.
My family is my salvation. Carolyn is amazing and makes sure I get my meds when I need them. I take quite a cabinet full of meds twice a day. I’m hoping to modify the number of drugs I’m taking. I may be taking too much in the way of pain management. The effect of my pain meds is dizziness. In the mornings I can predict exactly when the dizziness will come on. It doesn’t bother me in the afternoon because meds have worn off by then.
Throughout all of my myeloma life I try to keep a real connection with the action around me on the property. We’re getting a number of birds at the feeders. The jays are right into the suet and now we’ve got some woodpeckers, varied thrushes, and towhees coming to the feeder. Some flickers join the other birds competing for the suet. The smaller birds like the finches, pine siskins, goldfinches, and nut hatches focus on the black sunflower seeds and nyger seed in the feeders themselves. It’s sunny today and the snow is melting. Tilly, our Bernese/Shepherd cross loves this weather and makes nests in the snow on the deck.
She spends way more time outside now than inside. She is a sweetie although I wish she wouldn’t bark quite as much as she does.
It’s October 5th, 2020. That means it’s pretty much a year since I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. I expected that this month would be my last one in my first course of chemotherapy. As it turns out it was not my last month because I decided a couple of months ago to forgo my last two cycles of chemo treatments because of the neurological damage I was experiencing. Chemo was doing away with the myeloma protein in my blood but it was also killing me. That’s not good, so we decided to stop.
Who knows what happens now. I went to the lab last week for some blood tests in anticipation of visits with oncologists later this month. I have the results: they show that my Lambda Free Light Chains (a type of blood protein that is used as a marker for myeloma) are trending up, now out of the zone the medical profession has decided is the reference (some would say, normal) zone. That is not good news, in my opinion. The increase in my Lambda Free Light Chains hasn’t been dramatic, but it sure concerned me.
I contacted Dr. Malcolm Brigden’s office in Victoria. Brigden is the oncologist assigned to me by the BC Cancer Agency. His assistant, after consulting with the good doctor, advised that there was no clinical reason for me to have my meeting with said Dr. Brigden brought forward as I had requested because Light Chain numbers go up and down all the time.
That’s not what I’m seeing in the test results but I’m no oncologist. Still, I’m seeing a definite trend in one direction.
So we wait until October 21t to drive to Victoria for a fifteen minute appointment with said Dr. Brigden. The issue for me (for us, including the family) is where I’m at in terms of treatment. Brigden will decide what to do now that I’ve been off of chemotherapy for three months. He may decide to do nothing and wait for my next set of blood tests. He may decide to get me started on another course of chemo. I expect he’ll choose the former, that is he’ll choose to do nothing and wait for test results three months down the road. Whatever. I have some research to do about how Lambda Free Light Chains react in remission but before a new course of treatment is initiated. You may detect a note of cynicism in my composition here. If you did, you’d be right. I’ve read a fair bit about oncology, both the research and clinical aspects of it and I can’t help but feel that clinicians are all over the map in terms of treatment options and approaches. There are no real standards in the field. That is partly due to the idiopathic nature of myeloma. There is no one treatment option for patients in relapse.
I guess I need to be patient. I find patience a little difficult to achieve these days, but I need to cultivate a ‘letting go’ approach to this ‘problem.’
Sarah Kerr died on October 3rd after maybe six years of suffering with colon cancer. In 2018 she gave an interview to the Comox Valley Record in which she claims to have had over 60 chemo treatments over the previous five years. That’s just not the way it works for myeloma. I got one over the last year. In the same interview she reports on various different alternative therapies she tried including vitamin C infusions (@$200/week). Her quality of life was severely affected by her chemo treatments.I didn’t know Sarah very well. She was more of an acquaintance than a friend. I knew her from my pre-retirement North Island College days with Sarah making pots and just generally being around the Art Department. She was a Facebook friend too. We had a large number of FB friends in common.
The last time I spoke with Sarah was a few weeks ago on my way into the Cancer Care Centre at the hospital here. She was just heading out after a treatment. Neither of us had much time to chat. Sarah was obviously much distressed. I don’t know anything about colon cancer but I know she suffered tremendously from it. It was unrelenting. No more, Sarah.
Dennis Renaud died on September 30, 2020. He worked for many years at the Courtenay Return-it Centre. I got to know him a bit over the years partly because we were both French-Canadians from outside Quebec. He had Joseph in his name too. Many French-Canadians of a certain generation do. The women have Mary somewhere in their name.
The thing I noticed about Dennis was the way he worked. I’m always impressed by people who work in jobs that could be seen as extremely mundane and boring, but who seem to try to get the most out of every action they undertake as they work. It was obvious to me watching Dennis work that he was always looking for the most efficient way of moving cans and bottles along from the desk to the roller conveyers behind him. He could count bottle and cans very quickly and he never lost a beat. He was one of the most efficient workers I knew.
I didn’t know Dennis socially. He was a FB friend for some time, but he wasn’t that active on social media. In April of this year he was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. Five months later he was dead. He was two years younger than me. A good, former Catholic, sort of French Canadian kid, like me.
In a way I envy you Dennis. No lingering around with chemo treatment after chemo treatment with shit for quality of life. I think Sarah might just agree with me and in a way she might envy you too.
I love begonias. Carolyn grew these in a hanging pot just outside the back door. I saw the every time I walked to the back yard, a half dozen times a day. These flowers are deadly difficult to render realistically. I need a lot more practice to do them well. I’m learning, though. In ‘nature’ there are no lines but drawing this flower requires that I draw lines. The trick is to make the lines disappear into the contours of the subject. It’s not possible with ink, at least it’s not easy. Besides I love the effect ink gives a piece and if I want to look at a begonia not translated via the synapses of my brain I just look at the photo. The begonia I draw tells me as much about my synapses and my brain as it does about the subject matter.
This is quite impressionistic. Definitely not ‘realistic.’
The begonias below, one behind the other are stunning in my mind.
I draw them using a .3 copic pen and then use watercolour on them. This time I use a wet watercolour technique. I haven’t finished this piece yet as you can see. The next one I do will be done with no ink, just watercolour directly on paper with no preparatory drawing. We’ll see how that goes.
And now just look at all the other beautiful flowers that are still blooming in the garden in early October!
If you feel so moved you might just want to ‘like’ my post!
Well, it’s Monday morning around ten o’clock. The last four or five days have been really interesting. Last Thursday I went to the hospital for my weekly injection of bortozemib, the proteasome inhibitor that I take along with my chemo meds and dexamethasone. My bortozemib injections have always left a type of raised, red rash at the injection site on my belly. To try to alleviate the itching and swelling I took fifty mg of Benadryl to try to counteract the rash and swelling caused by the bortozemib. We also applied Benadryl cream to the injection site. The rash doesn’t hurt per se, but it’s super itchy and I feel like I need to reach down inside of the injection site to scratch my insides. It’s very annoying. Probably more important, though, is staying on this course of treatment. We had to stop a previous attempt at treatment with another chemo cocktail because the injections of the drug I was getting during that treatment were causing a huge rash, fiery red and raised, covering most of my midsection. This time I wanted to keep the rash under control so I could carry on with this chemo cocktail.
This past Thursday, the oncology nurses looked at the rash I was getting from my injections (which seemed to be getting worse week by week) and decided to bring in a doctor to see if there was anything we could do to mitigate it. After some consultation, they decided to inject the bortozemib into my right arm instead of my belly. Along with that strategy, they recommended taking more Benadryl. Well, I can say that the strategy was a success as far as the action at the injection site is concerned. There is way less irritation, rash, and swelling at the injection site in my arm than in my tummy. Today, five days after the injection, the irritation is minimal. However, now I had to deal with the effects of increased doses of Benadryl.
I didn’t think I could sleep that many hours straight. Last Friday I was more or less fine during the day and into the evening. We even went out for an hour or so late in the afternoon. Later, at around eight o’clock in the evening, I took fifty milligrams of Benadryl to try to really hit the rash before it got going. Well, that worked. Even though the dexamethasone usually keeps me awake all night, this night was different and I slept all night. In the morning I took some more Benadryl and was less than alert after that. In fact, I was pretty much stoned the whole day. Remember, I’m taking hydromorphone, a synthetic opioid, for pain already. Stacking Benadryl on top of that left me incapable of much of anything, especially clear thinking. Reading and writing were beyond me. Saturday night I went to bed around eight o’clock, fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow and stayed that way until seven-thirty on Sunday morning except for a couple of pee breaks. Even then, I was still semi-stoned. Sunday was a day of backing off the Benadryl! We found that the swelling and the rash around my injection site on my arm were not too bad. We applied some ice and that helped calm down the swelling too. Today, the itch is pretty much gone. I’m pretty happy about that.
So, the moral of the story seems to be that I have to get stoned to mitigate the swelling and rash that are caused by the bortozemib. Oh well, if that’s the price I have to pay, so be it.
Lab Work
Today was one of my regular lab days. I have standing requisitions at the lab every two weeks for one set of tests, once a month for another set, and once every three months for a set ordered by my kidney specialist. The techs are getting to know me at the lab in Cumberland. Today I gave up five vials of blood and a container of urine. Later today I’ll be able to access the results of some of the tests online via MyHealth. I’ll do that and carry on here then.
Okay, so it’s five o’clock and I checked my lab results. The few results that are in point to numbers back within reference ranges or in very positive, normalizing trends. Works for me.
Thursday will be another interesting day. We’ll be going to Campbell River Hospital to get my right femur x-rayed and for a consultation with the orthopaedic surgeon. I’m kind of worried about the excavations in my femur. I’m hoping the chemo and the zoledronic acid have done something to stabilize my bone marrow over the past couple of months. We’ll know more next week.
We went for a walk this morning around the airport on the River Walkway in Courtenay. It was overcast and coolish, quite pleasant as far as weather goes for this time of year. The ducks are getting up to their mating ways and even the redwing blackbirds have started singing. I think one or two of them may be rushing it, trying to get a head start on the mating action. It’s a good walk for me because it’s flat and paved. I’m still not that steady on my feet and I’m not sure about that lytic lesion in my right femur that lately seems to be getting a little more ‘present’, insisting that it not be forgotten.
My brain, frontal lobe really, also insists that it not be ignored. It tells me that it needs more and more information about the bad boys excavating my bones, crowding out and bullying the good boys that are working hard to make hemoglobin for me. It threatens never to let me rest until it’s satisfied, and from what I can tell, it’s a long way from being satisfied. I have been feeding it, though. It’s not being ignored even though it does sometimes have to take a seat and wait until other parts of my body are willing to participate. My amygdala is pretty insistent these days. The various parts of my brain don’t always want to be nice and play together. Some days they are more likely to coöperate, generally those two or three days, Mondays to Thursdays, just before I get a new load of chemo drugs on Thursday mornings. On other days, organized rebellion reigns. Thursday evening is my hyper time, no sleep. Fridays are a mix of hyper, lightheadedness, dizziness and near disorientation. My whole body tingles and my feet are somewhere between freezing and very cold. Saturday my bortozemib injection (which I get on Thursday at the hospital) site on my stomach starts to get inflamed and begins to itch. I have to take antihistamine to counteract that, but I’m a bit worried that the inflammation is getting worse with every injection. The area around the injection site gets very hot and red, and itchy beyond description. This is when Carolyn and I pore over the literature on the various drugs I’m taking trying to get a handle on what I’m experiencing in terms of side effects and indulging my frontal lobe with a bit of a snack. From what my oncologist told us in our last interview, I could be on this particular chemo protocol for at least another six months so I’d better get used to it. Of course, things constantly change as we go along so past experience is not necessarily a good measure of what I can expect in the future. Right now, getting ‘used to’ anything seems like a little far-fetched.
Thankfully, there are periods of time when I can sneak in a bit of reading and even some writing. It’s a good thing that I write fairly quickly because I often am too preoccupied with my symptoms to concentrate for any length of time or keep a train of thought going. My trains of thought are always getting derailed. Generally, if I get an hour or so of reading or writing in at a time, I’m happy. That works for me because what the hell else have I got to do?
Lately I’ve been reading a variety of things. I get a bit overloaded with books, articles and other materials dealing with cancer every now and then and that’s when I pick up a book on Medieval Europe. Right now I’m reading a book called The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe, (2002) by Patrick J. Geary. It’s an easy read. Just right for bedtime. The composition is a bit clunky and Geary probably needs a better editor, but eventually he makes his point, not that I’m going to discuss it here. The books, reviews, and reports that have claimed most of my attention lately have been on the topic of cancer. Too bad I wasn’t reading them on a nice beach on the Tropic of Cancer. 🙂 They are important for feeding my frontal lobe.
I mentioned in a previous blog post Barbara Ehrenreich’s book: Natural Causes. It’s polemical and iconoclastic to the core. I love Ehrenreich for the way she hounds the medical profession and business for excesses of enthusiasm for making money at the expense of the quality of life of patients. In this book she rails against overdiagnosis, a point to which I return later, and the false emphasis on building the immune system to fight cancer and other serious illnesses. She notes that macrophages, special white blood cells are an important aspect of our immune systems in that they attack and destroy invading bacteria and other infections at wound sites. The problem is that they can also provide cancer cells with conduits for metastasis, creating the means by which cancers can spread to distant parts of the body. She argues that we shouldn’t be such cheerleaders for our immune systems because they could very well be traitors in our midsts.
I just finished reading another of her books: Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (2009). This book trashes one of the most iconic delusions of American life, the power of positive thinking. In Natural Causes she applies this idea to medicine, the wellness industry and cancer treatment when undue optimism detracts from realistic appraisals of health and illness. She argues that from the perspective of wellness and mindfulness whereby we have control over our bodies, every death is a suicide. The argument goes that if we control our bodies with our minds and we die, it must mean that our minds wanted us to die! Well, there ya go. I guess mindfulness has its limits. Ehrenreich is not too keen on negative thinking either though. She argues for critical thinking, not positive or negative thinking. Fair enough.
The book that is most relevant to cancer is one that I quoted from in my last post. It’s called The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (2010) by Siddhartha Mukherjee. It’s a sweeping analysis of cancer detection and treatment over the past few centuries. Of course, most of the cancer action has occurred over the past few decades and many of the protagonists in the book are still alive. Mukherjee interviewed many of them for his book, bringing to life the stories he tells about the development of cancer treatment drugs and protocols. I had no idea that there was such a divide between clinicians and scientists in the cancer world. Biologists and other scientists, Mukherjee notes, have often been at odds over knowledge and treatment. Oncologists want to treat patients. Scientists want to know more about the disease and its genesis. What’s clear is that cancer treatment using surgery, radiation and chemotherapy has moved ahead in leaps and bounds in the last thirty years. ‘Success’ in treatment, often measured in months of survival, has grown exponentially over the last three decades. Drugs called ‘biologics’ are increasingly used to target specific types of cancers in certain types of people. In other words, cancer treatments are becoming more individualized, more targeted. This is all very encouraging, especially for someone like me who has cancer. However, there are problems and the sky ahead is not without clouds.
That’s the topic of my next post. This one’s already long enough. Stay tuned.
Carolyn and I have just finished reading The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. The author, an oncologist and Renaissance man, who won a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction for this work in 2011, masterfully addresses the war on cancer over the past few centuries or so, but with a special focus on more recent events and ‘successes’ relating to specific cancers and new treatments. Cancer, as the books so often argue, is not one disease but lots of different diseases. They all have one thing in common, though: pathological mitosis.
I’m not going to review the book today. I will, though, sometime soon. I’m kind of bummed out right now and not really in the mood to write a long blog post. I took my chemo meds again today. That’s always a fun time, but I’m still confused about just what accounts for how I’m feeling. Sometimes we call these feelings ‘symptoms’ but I don’t like that word much. I’m not sure why. For instance, this afternoon I felt exhausted, and lightheaded, somewhat dizzy too so I went to bed for a nap. As I lay there my body was tingling all over. Is that a feeling or a symptom? If it’s a symptom, is it a symptom of my myeloma, the chemo meds or something else? It’s still tingly, but not as intensively as this afternoon.
I’m bummed, but I should be celebrating, I guess. I had a five minute telehealth conference with my Victoria-based oncologist yesterday morning that’s left me feeling a little empty. For one thing, although he called me by name when we made screen connection (It’s like Skype on steroids), he was not prepared in the slightest for the interview. He asked me how I was doing on a chemo cocktail he had withdrawn me from a few weeks ago. Then he asked me what he could do for me. Well, shit. He then got so focussed on the computer screen he was looking at with my charts all over it that I might as well have not been there. So, I asked him about my lab results. Yes, he said, everything is going very well. The drugs are working. Reason to celebrate, right? Yes, I suppose, but then he says that I had better get used to the shitty quality of life I have because that’s my future. Even if I go into remission. Well, slap me in the back of the head! It wasn’t that long ago that he sat before me and told me I’d regain some good quality of life in remission. Maybe he was having a bad day. Now I was having a bad day too. I felt that this guy needs a talking to about compassion. He rebuffed any attempt I made at personal conversation. He was cold and completely detached. Maybe he was having a bad day but maybe not. Maybe he’s like this most of the time. Then I thought, maybe my expectations are too high. Maybe I should think of him as a consultant, more than as a doctor treating me like my GP would. After all, I see him for five minutes every four months. So, whatever, I’m still bummed out. Distractions like writing, reading, and watching YouTube videos are good for me, but I can’t be distracted a hundred percent of the time. Any break, any crack in my distractions and the dark light of myeloma reminds me in no uncertain terms of my mortality.
Mukherjee is so informative. I learned a lot reading his book. I’m also reading a book on Medieval medicine and even a thousand years ago, ‘doctors’ recognized cancer for the killer that it is, but they looked for the causes in ‘black bile’ and other humours gone bad. Towards the end of his book Mukherjee gets real for me. It’s all fine and dandy to ‘know’ about cancer, to study it, to follow developments in its treatment, but now, cancer has me up close with its unrelenting presence. I leave you with two quotations from Mukherjee’s book. I am these quotations.
“The poet Jason Shinder wrote, “Cancer is a tremendous opportunity to have your face pressed right up against the glass of your mortality.” But what patients see through the glass is not a world outside cancer, but a world taken over by it—cancer reflected endlessly around them like a hall of mirrors.” (from “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer” by Siddhartha Mukherjee)
AND…
“Cancer is not a concentration camp, but it shares the quality of annihilation: it negates the possibility of life outside and beyond itself; it subsumes all living. The daily life of a patient becomes so intensely preoccupied with his or her illness that the world fades away.” (from “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer” by Siddhartha Mukherjee)
When I look in the mirror I see an old man. I don’t see an old man with cancer. I just see an old man with a white beard, not much hair, and wrinkly skin. Melanoma (skin cancer) often leaves visible, sometimes unsightly and disfiguring lesions. I don’t have melanoma, although my father did. No, I have myeloma (bone marrow cancer) and its damage is all done on the inside, invisibly. So, I guess I can keep expecting people who see me say: “Wow, you’re looking good!” I guess I DO look good! Now, the last thing I want is to discourage people from telling me how good I look, so keep it up! However, the invisibility of my condition is deceiving. I remember when I was a kid my friends and I used to work on our cars. That was still possible when I was a kid. Often we’d stand around looking into the engine compartment (often of my 1956 Pontiac four-door hardtop) wondering what could possibly be wrong as if just staring at the engine would give us some kind of clue. The engine was always sparkly clean and there was nothing obviously gone awry. If I had money by some quirk of circumstance I might take the car to a mechanic. If not, we might borrow my dad’s tools and start taking things apart. That usually ended up badly. Yes, the most undesirable conditions in life are often on the inside, impossible to see or diagnose by just looking at the person or car in question. I find it best to consult mechanics when our car shows signs of disfunction. I find it best to consult medical specialists for treatment related to my body. I guess I could try to treat myself using any number of the ‘cures’ available on Dr. Google, but I would like to live a while longer, thanks. Besides, I’m not that desperate.
Speaking of medical specialists, we saw my local oncologist today. I see him every five weeks. The result of our visit is that I will carry on with a second course of chemotherapy. We’ll evaluate how well it went in five weeks. My first course of treatment seems to have gone as well as could be expected. The little excavator in my bone marrow is slowly running out of gas and my red blood cell garden is growing again. I’m still exhausted and that won’t change for some time yet, but things are certainly going in the right direction for now. I think I just might be a model patient. So, where does this all leave me?
Well, I may be on my way towards remission. If and when I do go into remission, and that’s by no means guaranteed at this point, that would buy me some time. By that I mean that I may have a few years more to live, though inevitably, either the myeloma will kill me or some other condition will. I won’t be walking away from this situation, brush the dust from my sleeves and carry on. No, I’m on a one way street. So are you, of course, but I can see that damned barrier at the end of the street. I’m hoping that you’re still far enough away from it that you can live in blissful denial for a while longer. I don’t have that luxury. So now what do I do with my life?
That question came up in a recent Facebook thread, albeit expressed in a different way, but with the same effect, I believe. The question comes down to this: If you knew that you had a given amount of time left to live (six months, two years, whatever), what would you do with your time? Would you to be seized by an overwhelming sense of urgency? Would you be determined to cram as much activity and experience into your remaining time as possible? Or would you curl up in a fetal position in a corner of your bedroom quivering and whimpering while you await your inevitable demise? If you have the money and the energy you might want to get out there and travel the world. If you have a spouse, that might complicate things more or less because they may not want the same things you do and may not want to get caught up in your sense of urgency. The last thing you need when facing terminal cancer is marital discord. I think there’s a lot to be said for just carrying on with life as before.
If you have the energy and the money then good on ya. If you travelled a lot before your diagnosis then travel after. Your eventual energy deficits will tell you when to stop. If you were fairly sedentary, more into being at home and puttering around the yard, then that would be something you might want to continue doing. The stress of travel may not be that good for you. Looking around the Cancer Centre at the North Island Hospital this morning I didn’t see a lot of people with obvious enough vigour to engage in a lot of physical activity. In any case, back to my situation.
My exhaustion prevents me from doing much in the way of physical activity. If I do go for a walk I pay for it later. Travelling is impossible. At one point I thought it might be possible, say, to take a direct flight to Puerto Vallarta back and forth from Comox, but there are a number of contingencies that make that next to impossible that have more to do with arthritis and disk degeneration than cancer. Besides, I take chemo drugs once a week orally but also by injection at the hospital. For three or four days after I take my meds I feel crappy, really crappy so the chances of enjoying myself on a beach somewhere are slim to none.
So what do I want to do, and what do I actually do? Well, I want to work on our canoe, finish some paintings, do odd jobs around the property and visit family and friends in Vancouver and further afield. What I actually do is sit and lie down a lot. As I sit and lie down, I read, and sometimes I even write. At the moment I’m reading social history around the Middle Ages and doing a bit of research on my family roots in Normandy. That’s something I would have done anyway, but I do miss working in my shop and studio and going for long walks with Carolyn and our imaginary dog. My oncologist thinks I will regain my energy, at least as much as an old man can expect. If so, that would be great. I’d love to get back to canoeing, camping and puttering.
When I get closer to dying I will know it, and I expect I will have time to think about it, but there really isn’t much thinking that is productive about dying, at least not for me. I’ll know when it’s time for palliative care. I don’t want to live as long as the oncologists might want to keep me alive. I’ll make the decision when the time comes. I don’t think it will be a really hard decision. I know that beginnings are impossible without endings. My ending is a lot closer now than my beginning! That’s fine. Frankly, I’m much more concerned with my family than I am with myself. They are the ones left behind to mourn. But both of my parents are dead and we got on with life after their deaths. My family will do the same when I’m gone. That’s what we do as humans. Like it or not, accept it or not, rage against it or cower in a dark corner, the end result is the same. Don’t sweat it.
First off, I’d like to welcome all of you who are new to following my blog. It’s gratifying to know that my writing is of interest.
[Still holding off on the post about the Emergency Department at the Royal Jubilee Hospital in Victoria. I’m working on it, but I need to write this post and at least one more first.]
Day before yesterday Carolyn drove me up to the North Island Hospital, Comox Valley Campus (I think that’s right) for my first chemotherapy treatment using a drug combination sometimes referred to as CyBorD. The ‘cy’ stands for cyclophosphamide, ‘bor’ stands for bortezomib and ‘d’ stands for dexamethasone. This article from 2009 suggests that this combination is associated with a very rapid response with manageable toxicity. I can only hope that it works for me.
I get the cyclophosphamide (cyclo) and the dexamethasone by tablet to be taken orally every seven days on a cycle of four weeks. I get a subcutaneous injection of bortezomib on the same day as I take the oral doses of the other two drugs. I get another drug by infusion once a month. It’s called zoledronic acid and is a bone strengthening medication often given to patients who have weakened bones due to cancer, which I do. I haven’t had my first injection of zoledronic acid yet but that’s coming soon.
So, I take a schwack of pills, probably fifteen, every Thursday morning then head up to the hospital in the afternoon for my bortezomib injection and for a visit with the oncology nurses. The oncology department at the hospital is superb. The staff is wonderful, calm, attentive and supportive.
The day before the day before yesterday Carolyn drove me to the hospital for a visit with the GP oncologist who is the local connection I have with the oncologist at the BC Cancer Agency in Victoria. Like the rest of the staff, Dr. Bakshi explained all the procedures I was about to experience calmly and attentively. One thing I appreciated with Dr. Bakshi was the way he explained the difference between myeloma and other forms of cancer. Myeloma is not like pancreatic cancer or other forms of virulent cancer. It’s more of a lay-low, make you sick for a long time type of cancer. It’s not unusual for people with myeloma to live ten years after being diagnosed and by then life is mostly a rear-view mirror phenomenon in any case. Myeloma is a disease mostly of older people.
I have to keep this post short because I have very little energy today. Yesterday I had a ‘high’ which was like I imagine I would feel after drinking twenty cups of strong coffee. Boy was I hyper! That’s caused by the dexamethasone. I had a hell of a time trying to sleep night before last, but last night was okay. I finally got a different prescription for my pain meds, hydromorphone. It’s a slow release prescription. I take two tablets a day twelve hours apart rather than taking two short acting tablets every four hours. I still have to get up to pee at night a couple of times, but not having the alarm go off every four hours is quite nice.
Today I got up feeling like I had a huge hangover. That feeling is still with me. It’s not all that pleasant, but it’s tolerable and I’m not going to complain about it. I knew that chemotherapy was not going to be a cake walk and I was right. I have a long way to go with it yet and the experience with it will change as I go along. I just hope I can tolerate this cocktail of meds and it doesn’t push my peripheral neuropathy to intolerable levels, nor does it damage my poor lone kidney.
I told you in my last post that I had gotten a skeletal CT scan a week ago Saturday, November 9th. I know what these scans are looking for and I was somewhat apprehensive about getting the results. I still haven’t heard from my oncologist about the scan and I won’t be talking to him about it until Wednesday, the 20th. However, my GP called me on Friday the 15th at 5:30 PM to talk to me. Truth is, whenever my GP calls at 5:30 on a Friday evening it’s never good news.
The first question he asks me is if I’d heard anything about the scan. I said no, nothing. He then proceeds to tell me that I have a four centimetre tumour (lesion) in my right femur. Now, that’s a fairly large lesion but it’s in a fairly large bone too. Still, one of the main problems with multiple myeloma is bone lesions. Patients can have several bone lesions simultaneously making their lives somewhat precarious. Any wrong move can lead to broken bones and immobility.
My GP is rightly concerned about this femoral lesion and tells me that I may need a full length splint to keep my leg immobilized but it’s Friday evening now and I’m in no shape to even consider getting one, especially if it means going to the ER. That’s not going to happen. Not in a hundred years!
After a time my GP and I settle on a plan to keep me more or less immobilized, at least until Monday. Carolyn and I get back to our dinner. A while later my GP calls again after having consulted with an orthopaedic surgeon. The surgeon tells him that I will probably need radiation on that tumour and that radiation treatments happen in Victoria. Until then, I need to keep my right leg as immobile as possible. We’re getting a wheelchair on Tuesday. That will help, and on Wednesday I talk to my oncologist about where we go from here in terms of chemotherapy and now radiation treatments.
You know what? I want some straight answers. That’s all. I know that straight answers are not as easy to come by as they should be, but I’d like a clear, unadulterated assessment of my prognosis at the moment, if you don’t mind. So far, my oncologist and I had not even discussed bone lesions and the treatments for them, and we assumed that the lenalidomide/dexamorphosone chemotherapy drug combination would work and that we would reassess in a year or so.
Yes, I understand that multiple myeloma is highly treatable although it’s incurable, but every myeloma patient presents with an idiopathic set of conditions making blanket prognostications about remissions and potential lifespans kind of useless, if not overly optimistic. So far I have no idea how bad a case of myeloma I presented with and my oncologist is not really interested in what stage I’m at. He says he’s much more interested in how a patient responds to treatments than where they might be on a staging continuum. That’s fine. I hope that sometime soon we will actually be able to assess just how I’m doing on a new course of chemotherapy drugs and that we will be able to conclude that what I’ve experienced so far is a temporary glitch in my treatment.
Whatever. I like taking road trips on winding roads in unfamiliar territory, but a nice stretch of open highway now and again can be exhilarating too. I’d like to see some open road for a change where obstacles can be seen a long way off and I can put the petal to the metal. Is that too much to ask for?
Roger Albert - Always a Sociologist: Now Living With Myeloma 