After my doctors met to review all of the latest information today, a few key things happened:
-Neurosurgery is happy with my healing process and is okay with proceeding to chemo.
-Infectious Disease is happy that my fevers are gone (either on their own or with a new flavor of antibiotic).
-Oncology thinks I’m stable enough to begin treatment but I’m not strong enough for their originally proposed course of chemo. They’ve changed to chemo “light” which is a lower potency version I should tolerate well in my condition.
My first dose of chemo began this afternoon. I’ll get another infusion tomorrow. This cycle of chemo “light” will last 4 weeks. After that, I will advance to the higher dose “R-CHOP” chemo which comes with the fatigue, hair loss, etc. people are familiar with. In the overall scale of chemo, R-CHOP is pretty tolerable too though. This chemo will be on a 3 week cycle ( for 5 cycles or about 15 weeks).
There will be lots of checkpoints along the way to make sure I’m responding to chemo. Each test can change this plan but it’s good to finally be in treatment and have a plan!
Although it has been frustrating to be back in the hospital instead of home, there is no doubt this was a necessary step. I am safely entering chemo a full week earlier than planned because of the extra attention of these doctors to whom I am very thankful. All of them came in to see me and review my case on their days off today (Saturday). I have truly been blessed by the care I am getting.
–Captain Seth