A General Update

There’s not a whole lot to report out on since getting the balls rolling with my next steps a few days ago. Another of my potential treatment option paths, a phase II Head and Neck drug trial at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston is now off the table due to prior use of Docetaxel a year ago. I am continuing to explore the use of another trial drug following a few different avenues and also keeping in mind the Avastin / Tarceva path option discussed with my doctor on Thanksgiving Day almost two weeks ago. I hope to have a clear direction by the end of this week or at the latest, early next week.

My workouts are coming along quite well. I’ve increased my aerobic intensity 40% (based on calories burned) in a 30 minute period and am now using 5 to 20 pound dumbbells in place of the 5 pound dumbbells I began with on 11/10/07. I’ve averaged 5 workouts per week during this 4 week period, but plan to drop down to 4 per week to give my body a chance to build itself up between exercise days. Muscles build themselves up by repairing themselves after a workout and they need a day break between workouts to do this repair. I’m not sure this is factual, but as you get older, one has a tendency to state as fact what someone somewhere once told them. I think that Andy Rooney of 60 Minutes would agree with me on this one.

I feel more like I’m moving from Cancer World back to the world I once knew. I’m not there yet, but I’m headed in the right direction. My eating and talking will never be back to “normal,” but I’ll get past that within the next few months if I can keep the disease from returning. Traveling is still pretty much out of the question due to the resulting stress and hardship caused by these two disabilities.

For those of you that follow Leroy Siever’s NPR cancer blog (and even for those of you that don’t), he has had three blog entries in the last four entries that have resonated with me this past week. The NPR website URL is at…

http://www.npr.org/blogs/mycancer/

The blog entries are:
12/04/07 – Enjoying the Lights this Year
12/03/07 – Getting Your Hopes Up
11/29/07 – Suspended in Time

They were all so well written and so close to my own feelings at one time or another in the recent past. So, if you’re interested in better understanding the perspective of a longer term cancer patient and to a large degree, me, I encourage you to read his blog. I posted a comment on his blog on 12/03/07; this is something I do about once per month. When he is feeling well enough, he reads the comments which can range from a low of 50 to up to 200 per day. He has really touched a nerve in this cancer world which was largely unknown to many of us, me included, until recently. That's not to say one hasn't been touched by cancer, but there is a difference between being touched by cancer and truly understanding the impact.

Take care everyone and thanks once again for staying in touch.