We're back from vacation and as I had announced I had a PET scan on August 6 and we got the results on the 10. I have lots of things to talk about so I'll start with the news.
The scan report triggered my haematologist to change my treatment . Those of you who have read read my blog for a while know that I don’t have many options because I am KRAS mutant which eliminates therapy with Vectibix and Erbitux. So we can do two things: Clinical trials or resume Oxaliplatin. Oxaliplatin is the ox in FOLFOX, the cocktail that I took at the beginning and that was pretty effective. Unfortunately, I had an allergic reaction so we had to stop therapy in January 2009.
My haematologist considering the significantly positive response that I had to FOLFOX (shrinking of tumors), thinks it’s worth trying a challenge to Oxaliplatin. That’s why I'm going to be hospitalized on Monday and Tuesday of this week. I will be on tight medical supervision and they will try to give me Oxaliplatin over eight hours instead of 2. An infusion much slower than usual which could allow my body to tolerate the treatment.
We'll know soon enough.
Otherwise there are three studies currently in the U.S. on promising products for cases like mine. I must discuss them with my haematologist in order to decide which one to register into. In my next blog I will give you the details of these studies.
Apart from that our holidays were fantastic. Aside from the three cockroaches in our rooms and the iffy temperature on the cruise, everything was perfect.
The photos are on Facebook but for those who are not connected with Marie-Josee the following links will allow you to see the albums.
Cruise and Orlando and Palm Beach.
During my vacation I read a lot. I started with two magazines bought at the Montreal airport. One on the topic of technology in the medieval times and the other on the theory of evolution revised because of new discoveries. Some very interesting reading.
Then I read the latest novel by Michael Crichton, Pirates Latitudes. Interesting story since I was always sailing the carribeans while reading it. Then I read Jordan’s youth novel because he found it so good. Then on my new digital book reader, the Kindle DX, I read
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. I had already read his other book called
The Tipping Point and I appreciated his style, a cross between a research report and an opinion piece. Blink speaks of the phenomenon of intuition or what he calls Adaptive Unconscious. It attempts to show that sometimes it is better to make decisions without much analysis, but instead to follow our gut feeling.
I also read an old story, Shogun, a novel about medieval Japan. I then started reading Malcolm Gladwell’s (again)
Outlier, after reading Stanley Gold’s story:
Cancel the Funeral, I'd Rather Play Golf. He shares with us how he survived a metastatic melanoma.
All this reading motivate my children to read to. At the restaurant, people would comment on their concentration on their books.
Tomorrow I will start my preparation for hospital stay. I have to take Singulair to help my body fight any reactive inflammation.
I will write again as soon as I can.
Ciao!
