Cancer could be so much worse

Ghostbusters was an absolute smash hit when it came out in 1984. I was just barely into my twenties and the over-the-top (for the time) special effects and campy comedy delivered by some of the brightest creative minds of the day were mesmerizing. It even had a very  catchy theme song  that reached #1 on the music charts in the US and Canada and stayed there for three weeks. And it is that song as well as a whole cascade of positive memories and emotions related to it that have been bouncing around my cranium the past few weeks. Let me start out by saying that I don't define myself by what I do at work. I much prefer to define myself by the relationships I have with others - my children, my wife, my family, my friends. That said, as a clinical pharmacist words and phrases like thrombolytic and fibrin sheath  are as much a part of my vocabulary as slime or ectoplasm  were to the writers of Ghostbusters. I use them all the time with other medical professionals bec...

The Battle of Midway was one of the most significant naval battles in history, taking place over four days in early June of 1942 just six months after the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor. Although outnumbered in terms of both ships and aircraft, the United States Navy prevailed, destroying all of the Japanese carriers and their accompanying aircraft (248 aircraft in total across 4 carriers) and one heavy cruiser involved in the battle. The US Navy lost one carrier, one destroyer, and approximately 150 of 233 aircraft in the battle. Sadly, 307 US servicemen were killed in the battle, with over 3,000 Japanese servicemen perishing on the opposite side. So... what does this have to do with me and cancer? On the face of it, a devastating naval battle that occurred 72 years ago has nothing in common with my cancer diagnosis and treatment. But if you dig a little deeper there are at least a few passing similarities. First off, I have often heard of people "battling cancer"...

This. All of this. Everything I'm going through and everything I've written here. This  is why screening is important. Prior to December 17, 2018 I had no idea that there was a tumour growing in my rectum. I was asked by my GP to undergo a very non-invasive but inelegant test - pooping on a stick - out of an abundance of caution. The only reason for doing a FIT on me was that I had already completed more than fifty trips around the sun, and after that many miles my hardware needs to be checked. That test came back right at the threshold for reporting a positive result. I could  have ignored it. My GP even told me that if I didn't want to be referred for further screening we could just repeat the test in two years. What would have happened if I had waited two years, I wonder... Two years earlier, my FIT result was half the value it was last year. Neither result were impressive. And ironically, my results are apparently more related to whether I am having a flare of my ...

I've never been more aware that I am being treated for cancer than I have been in the past month. Which is odd, given that I underwent major abdominal surgery to have 24cm of my colon and 25 of my (insert unknown number between 300 and 700 here) lymph nodes removed because they might  harbour more of the adenocarcinoma that was discovered during my colonoscopy just eight weeks earlier. After all, going through that surgery should reasonably have been the most significant ordeal I had gone through in my fifty-plus years of life, and at the time both my surgeon and I believed that the surgery was all that I would need. But then there was that one  lymph node... Okay then. My surgeon and I had discussed the possibility of needing oral chemotherapy for six months after surgery if anything was uncovered during postoperative pathology studies. One of my lymph nodes was positive for the same type of adenocarcinoma that had been uncovered during my colonoscopy, triggering my refer...

I've written about lily pads before, and frankly I think it was some of my better writing. I'd humbly suggest you go back and re-read it at this point, but if you are busy and just need a refresher the gist of that very early post is that coping with the diagnosis and treatment and recovery associated with cancer is too big to be done at once. I need to take it one step at a time, like a frog crossing a pond using a series of lily pads (which they totally don't do but let's not get hung up on the literal here). With me so far? Good. So the lily pad that I have been on recently was kind of scary. In my last blog post I wrote about being neutropenic  and how my chemotherapy was delayed because of the risk of wiping out my bone marrow so badly that it wouldn't recover. I also wrote about the irony involved in my realization that the only thing worse than getting poisoned every two weeks with the resultant negative effects including neutropenia was not  getting po...

Getting chemo sucks. I mean, really  sucks. First off, just sitting in a chair for three hours while a very nice, very helpful nurse pumps what is essentially poison into my veins is at the very least tedious. There is not a lot to do, and for part of the time the nurse has to take down my old PICC dressing and replace it with a new one. But aside from that fifteen minute task, a lot of the time is spent sitting in the chair waiting for the poison to fill my veins. When it is all done, I get to go home with my baby bottle of more poison to run over the next two days, inconveniently attached to my PICC by an approximately one metre long tube. Okay, the medical term for it is an Intermate or Infusor , but the term baby bottle  describes it so much better. The baby bottle makes it impossible to shower. I wear a fanny pack (something I probably should have thrown out when the 80s ended and they were no longer fashionable) to contain the bottle, but as you might imagine it's als...

I hope this brief post makes at least a little sense. If it doesn't, well... look at the title and it might make sense why it doesn't  make sense. Chemo brain . If the Mayo Clinic calls it a thing, it's a thing. And although this post is short I wanted to share with you what it is like because it's kind of a hell of a thing. I wasn't really sure whether I would get chemo brain, but on the Sunday after my first cycle of chemo (four days after my oxaliplatin and two days after my fluorouracil finished) I woke up at 10:30 AM, way  later than I've been waking up. I walked out to the living room feeling like I was running the last mile of a marathon and sat in my chair for about ten minutes trying to figure out what I should do next. My stomach grumbled and so I figured I should eat something, but by the time I got to the kitchen (25 feet away), I had forgotten why I was there. I looked around the room for clues. Dishes... okay. Food... right. Stove, fridge, mi...

Atingle . There's a word you probably don't hear very often. I hardly ever use it (and I use a lot  of arcane and frankly pointless words), and even when I do it's always used sarcastically. Like: "Ooh! Another meeting? I'm all atingle." Yeah... I'm kind of a dick sometimes. I was before  I was diagnosed with cancer and spoiler alert: it doesn't look like the radiation got rid of that. But this time I'm not saying it to be a dick. This time I'm sincere. I really am  all atingle. But I'm going to keep you  all atingle as to the reason while I give a little more background info. Don't skip to the end; trust me, my observations will be worth it. What's PICCing you? Yeah... a stretch, I know.  PICC  stands for Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter. I only need to get eight courses of chemotherapy under my awkwardly-names GIRAJFFOX regimen and each course consists of a two-hour infusion of two drugs followed by a bolus (sometim...

I dropped by my place of work yesterday. I had to get some bloodwork drawn before I start my next round of chemotherapy and it's better for my oncologists if I get it drawn at the hospital, so after waiting half an hour for a two minute draw I headed down to "the dungeon" to see my friends and co-workers. It was wonderful. Everyone was happy to see me, I got a bunch of well wishes and wonderful, therapeutic hugs, and I got to catch up on who had started and who had left in the two months since I was last in the department. For a few minutes at least, I felt like I was living my previous life - my life before cancer. Then the questions started. "How are you doing?" "When are you coming back?" "So... what happens next?" The people I work with are all amazing, caring people. Sure, some of them have some rough edges and occasionally they squabble like children, but that's only because they are human beings and therefore not perfec...