Postponed chemo

Tuesday morning 6:00 am, Marie-Josée and I are en route for the hospital. As you know I must start my treatments by 7:30 am no later. Our eldest son is the babysitter for this morning. He is a certified babysitter now, with his two day seminar on babysitting and CPR.
I get into the hospital while my wife returns home to prepare lunches and snacks for the children and send them off to school. The third floor ward in oncology opens at 7:30 so I have time to go have breakfast at the hospital cafeteria.

7:30 am the first nurse shows up. She seems a bit surprise to see me there but since she knows how long my treatment is she tells me to go sit in one of the treatment rooms so she can set up my port-O-cath. When she comes in the room she asks me if the coordinating nurse left me a message. I say no. She them tells me that my neutrophils count (white blood cells) is too low so they won’t give me my chemo today. It is delayed for a week. To be sure, I wait for G, the scheduling nurse, to arrive. Upon her arrival she confirms that she left a message yesterday around 3:30 pm to say that upon consulting with Dr L., she rescheduled me for next week.

Conclusion my wife and I woke up early and travelled to the hospital for nothing.

I call MJ who has to get in traffic again to come and get me. It was a rock'n'roll morning for her. Plus it’s my fault because I did not get my Neupogen injection which serves to boost the number of white blood cells. I told my wife that I felt in top shape and thought that I did not need the injections…I was wrong.
You can be sure that this weekend MJ will inject me a couple of times with Neupogen so that next week I will have enough WBC to receive my chemo.

Clinical trials

 

I think you have waited enough with my message on Facebook. I apologize.

Here's the situation.
In my last appointment with Dr L he told me about a research protocol in the United States. A former colleague of his left for Bethesda, Maryland at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Health Institute (NIH) for a fellowship in surgical oncology. This colleague presented a protocol that is in the field of immunotherapy and Dr. L thought of me as soon as he heard the details of the study. I seemed to be the ideal candidate.

The protocol
In summary, the research is as follows:

They remove a tumour (surgery) and in laboratory they extract TIL cells (tumor infiltrating lymphocytes). Lymphocytes are a type of killer white blood cells. Those sought have successfully penetrated the tumour therefore have good potential to kill the it. If it did not happen yet, a theory is that perhaps they were not numerous enough. The researchers then multiply in test tubes (in vitro or ex vivo) the TIL that were extracted. they then enrich the multiplied TILs with another kind of cell called CD8+, another specialized cell killer. A kind of "Marines" lymphocytes.
This enriched cocktail is given back to the patient after having weakened his immune system to receive the autologous transplant. After that the cells "boosted" are supposed to re-enter tumours and do their job until the end.

It is a treatment that has been tested in other cancers such as melanoma, with enough success so that now researchers are trying it in other cancers such as colon cancer.
Our excitement was very high, particularly in our conversation with Dr. L where he said that this protocol was a potential cure. Word he never mentioned when talking about chemo.

Conclusion
We submitted all the necessary elements to Dr. Turcotte in the United States. After a week of waiting, I received the following message from him:
I received:
- Pathology reports of HSC and HND,
- A CT report dated 13/04/2010 which raised the possibility of recurrence in the left hypochondrium
- A PET-CT report of 06/08/2010 that supports the idea that the abnormality in the left hypochondrium could be a recurrence.

There is no evidence in these reports of liver metastases, pulmonary, peritoneal, good size tumour (at least 3 cubic centimeter) that we could resect to produce cells that serve in your treatment.
There is also no measurable lesions frankly (at least 1 cm) that could serve as a witness to the effectiveness of our treatment.
These data do not qualify you for our study, they suggest, and that's good news, if there is a recurrence, the therapy used presently seems to control the spread and progression of your cancer.

So you read the same thing as me. I'm not accepted in the study because my illness is actually too small right now. In a sense this is extremely positive as it reaffirms that I have no damage to the liver, lung or peritoneal lining big enough to meet the requirements of the study.
At the same time I have some disappointment because I already saw this treatment as a cure BUT I must continue the chemo for now.
My focus now is on achieving the same result as the protocol but without it. Maybe I can boost my TILs myself.