This week I visited the clinic for my monthly chemo shot. I had been counting down the months until I was potentially supposed to endure another week of high dosage induction chemotherapy. I underwent six rounds of it initially when I was diagnosed in 2012, then another last April, followed by a month of weekly high-dose shots in May/June.
The initial treatment was horrible. But it was like a dream. I floated through it, suffering, but without any other obligations or responsibilities. I was free to immerse myself in that process and to focus on surviving it. The follow up last spring was harder in some ways. I was back to work. I had to take a week of my vacation time to sit in the hospital receiving continuous injections. I lost my hair again. Living a 'normal' day to day life while undergoing that kind of chemotherapy was really hard. I have the utmost respect for those who can go through that and manage to function in their lives.
That experience was something I was dreading the pending repetition of this year. So I was counting down the months until this coming April. As the time was getting closer I began to lose my resolve a bit. I think the hardest thing has been feeling like I'm better, like all the way better, and then having to take more chemo and feel bad again. Over and over, I recover, start to feel really good, and then I have to take more. And I think that process was taking its toll on me. So as I contemplated another week in the hospital, the plastic bed, the isolation, vulnerability, and fear that I've experienced lying in those rooms, I was having a harder and harder time wrapping my head around it. It was becoming more and more difficult to reconcile how I have been feeling - better and better - with the need to put so much poison in my body again. Hadn't it been long enough, hadn't I responded well enough to the treatment, wasn't I OK already?
With those thoughts in my head I sat in one of the examination rooms at the clinic on Monday waiting for my doctor to knock on the door. When we began our conversation after he stepped into the room I steeled myself, preparing to be let down. I expected to receive his official opinion that, "we want to give you as much as we possibly can." Instead he started talking about all the different research on my disease. The various treatment regimens that are used. He compared them to my own treatment, and to my surprise he started talking about the fact that some maintenance schedules don't involve any induction at all. Of course, he said, some of those other regimens involve more chemo up front. Adding some of the drugs I took this past spring into the mix during the initial induction phase. And then he mentioned the idea that more and more, for patients under 30 (ok, not me, I'm no longer under 30), or maybe 40 (ok crap that's still me) they are using the same treatments they use in children - basically what I've been doing all along is the same chemo they would use to treat a kid with my disease - because individuals that age have been determined to be able to withstand the higher doses.
At this point he had hinted in both directions and internally I was on the edge of my seat, though I tried not to let on. And then he finally said it. Based on how well I responded to the initial treatment, on how well I've done all along, on the fact that I never had a positive CSF (they never found cancer in my cerebral spinal fluid), he didn't think I needed to do another round of induction chemotherapy.
It took me a few seconds to absorb this news. As it started to sink in I almost began to cry. I had been so scared of going back to the hospital, of the disruption to my life, my ability to do my job, the subsequent loss of my hair, for the third time, the whole thing. An enormous weight began to lift from my entire body.
We talked some more and decided that I would continue with the basic maintenance regimen I've been on since November, 2012. I get a shot each month, and I take oral meds regularly. This would continue until December of this year, and then we would stop. This year, 2014, would be it.
I'm happy to be able to share with you that the end is officially in sight. I now know when I will be able to hit the ejection button and escape from the roller coaster up and down of chemo and recovery and chemo and recovery for good. Of course, I don't know the future. Nothing is a guarantee. But I do know that come December, 2014, I will be done with treatment. And I will officially be able to move on with my life.
