DAY 047 -- "Different Ducks"

Here I am: still tumorous (though it's shrunken and shrinking, as we discovered yesterday), but I’m not reporting in this travelogue every day. When you and I began this, I didn’t miss a daily entry for the first few weeks after my diagnosis and the beginning of treatments. In fact, I’ve been more religious about writing here than I’ve ever been about religion anywhere.

Blogger’s license: As we travel on, we may indeed venture into exploring the finer and grittier nonsecular side of how I’m living with cancer, but not just yet. I’m not quite ready to draw that mortal marker in the sand, at least with the curved stick necessary to do it. Be patient.  

And, what’s this? Another change in agenda: As a veteran lung cancerite with his first courses of chemo and radiation completed, I’m breathing easier, and that’s only half a metaphor. Yes, I’m easing up a bit on the sequential reportage in this blog. Perhaps you’ve noticed. To paraphrase and beat a tired cliché senseless, I’m getting all my different ducks in a row.

If you have noticed, I hope you don’t think of it like you wouldn’t think of a piano tuner at a Bill Evans concert.

We can still rest for a day of reckoning or two, you and I, without missing a well-tuned instrument. And, lest we forget or find ourselves a little metaphor shy today, remember that some piano notes make their sound as the result of a felt hammer striking multiple strings.

Don’t get me wrong. There isn’t a day or night that my cancer takes time off in my mind’s rolling marquee. What is changing is that sometimes I read what’s playing, but I keep on moving and pass by the theater without going in.

Today with my oncologist, we reviewed what’s coming on the road ahead with immunotherapy at the wheel, and we talked about how “smart” cancer is. Like any invasive entity, cancer “finds its way around the obstructions” inside a body, and we now must get mine to outsmart it by reshaping the obstructions and rewriting the directions.

That’s way oversimplifying the process of immunotherapy, but I’ve had my fill of medical techno-pop lingo these past weeks and months. Let’s just stay with simple-speak for a while:

I’ll be getting an infusion every other week.

I’ll be dealing with a whole new array of side effects.

I’ll be okay.  Same lake. Same water. Same sky. Same island.  Different house.

But, one last concession for those of you who simply must have a finite visual: my tumor did shrink, from 5.5. cm X 3.0 cm, to 4.4cm X 1.8 cm. 

Take that.

Oh, and the trade name for my new immunotherapy drug?

"Imfinzi."

Cool, eh? Sounds like a low-riding, self-steering luxury convertible sports car.

More as we go, El