Chemo part deux

I got stuck in the Yankee pod at chemo today, but the natives were surprisingly friendly.

Last week for my first chemo treatment I happened to land with a nurse who was the facility's most outspoken Red Sox fan. But she was off today. This week's nurse, Amy, acknowledged she was a Yankees fan but unlike one of her colleagues, she's not a fanatic and said she would take
good care of me even after seeing my Fenway Park shirt. She did.

Take away the differing baseball allegiences, the experience was much the same as last week: lounging in a comfortable chair as a cancer-fighting drug and other medications dripped into a vein in my arm for about an hour, giving me only a slight burning sensation.

The medication mix was altered slightly in an attempt to improve my sleeping. I'll also ease up on exercise tomorrow to lessen the muscle soreness I expect based on what happened last week.

The main change in the medication mix was to cut the amount of steroids, which fight nausea but can also make sleep difficult, in half.

We met with our doc first, and I asked him about today's lead story in the Times about a new cancer-fighting advance that might to a way to kill cancer stem cells.

He hadn't seen the story, but glanced at it briefly when I brought it to his attention and said although it could be promising, anything for patients to come out of this research is probably years away.

I of course look at "medical-breakthrough'' stories differently than I used to. But I know enough about the news biz to realize that there are probably many potential pitfalls before the advance reported by the Times influences many people's lives. In other words, I'm not counting on it to help me.

Here's the rest of the schedule as we now it: same treatment next Friday then a week off; three more weeks of Friday treatments. Hope the Sox fare better in that period of time than they did between the first and second treatments.

No one mentioned the recent Sox sweep by the Yanks, which made my day better.