Today I received my 9th treatment. Last week they chose to not treat me to allow time for my platelets to recover.  That worked, but my ANC (a measure of infection resistance) was down. Rather than skip another week, the doctor decided to reduce my doses of the Oxalaplatin and the 5-FU instead. This hopefully will allow the ANC to rise back into the normal good range. There are various things that could have impacted that metric, including I assume getting any unfamiliar germs from my out of state visitors or the interactions at the party.  It is not a dangerously low level, and Friday we expect to do another CBC on my blood to see how it is doing. Also on Friday I should get the results of my latest CT scan to see how things are progressing.

At today’s treatment I encountered two men I had not seen in awhile. One who stared treatment when I did, and one who received his last treatment when I got my first. The first man has been having a harder go at it than I. His particular cancer when the did the DNA analysis is of the harder type to cure. The other man was there doing a maintenance treatment regime, but currently showed no signs of cancer. Like me he was stage 4 when diagnosed, so they will not say he is cured since there could be small cell clusters too small to show up in the scans, camping out somewhere. The maintenance is mainly oral and his visit was for blood work and labs.

So to make it clear, the CBC labs showing some deficiencies is not a setback. It is actually quite normal and many patients see these issues much earlier in their treatment. The fact that I have made it 2/3 of the way is great and certainly the accumulation of the toxins (and I do not mean that in a scary way, but the chemotherapy drugs are toxic substances that interfere with normal body functions) is expected to have deleterious side effects, hence the constant monitoring and blood work. I expect that these numbers will increase again in the next week.  I plan to transition to either the Keto diet or something quite close to it next week.  I discussed my plan with the NP and she was OK with the idea since any weight loss from it (and historically I react well to this diet) will be intentional and under my control.

One nice side effect of the delayed treatment week was a return of one of my taste buds.  On Tuesday I was actually able to taste my dinner, which unfortunately lead to a little bit of over eating since I expect that by the weekend this will have been reversed back to blandsville