A return to the road to forever and
a day today: back to my IV infusions, resuming an amended chemotherapy regimen, now minus the immunotherapy drug Keytruda (see Day Sixty-Five). On this leg of
my relay race with me, we’re passing the healing baton to Carboplatin, Pemetrexed
and countless social media well-wishes, prayers, attaboys and pagan dances.
Today I felt like a medi-pop upright bass player student intruder at the A Cappella Academy For Unwritten Notes.
Question: as a seriocomic aside, whoinhell NAMES these drugs? Answer:
the drug companies who make them, of course, and they are “reluctant to share
their strategies,” on how this is done.
Fact is, they pay big bucks to very
smart consulting folks who are part wordsmiths, part sorcerers and part Dr.
Frankensteins, to come up with them. It’s no accident that a drug name hits you
subliminally and often just plain hard-headedly, by tapping into images and
emotions the carefully chosen suffixes and prefixes provoke.
They use everything for these
name-naming assignments as resources, from thesauruses to country kitchen
recipe books.
Examples? “Flovent,” a respiratory
(air) drug. Bring anything to mind, like “Flow” and “Ventilate”? Simple but
genius, rolling off the tongue into your lungs and pocketbook.
Or, how about “Lopressor," a drug
for hypertension. Again, brilliant simplicity. If your brain doesn’t hear “low
pressure” when it sees that name, then you’ve never been squeezed by a sphygmomanometer.
Or, “Almotriptan” (a real drug used
to treat migraines). You know it without knowing it: You almost got a tan
on your last trip, if you’d only taken your anti-headache pill Almotriptan.
(Okay, I’ll stop).
Meanwhile, back at my perception of reality:
Difficult venipunctures today,
looking for a vein that didn’t roll or “blow.” The first four “little stings”
did (we used to call them “little pricks” in the nursing biz but political
correctness nipped that in its budness.).
They moved the insertion sites
around, palpated, eyeballed, until the nurse settled on the antecubital space
of my dominant upper right extremity (crook of my right arm in the bendy place).
See the trouble we get into if we
get too far in medical-ese? Better to simplify, simplify again, and then
oversimplify.
Doc says: My labs again “look great,”
some flirting with too-highs and/or too-lows, including one the Doc expected,
like my elevated but not yet alarming CRP (C-Reactive Protein).
An elevated CRP in the blood is “a
marker for inflammation.” In my case, pointing to leftovers from my recent bout
with “immune-mediated colitis,” still stalling in the wings, which almost did
me in, surprising everyone but me when it didn’t. (See Day Sixty-Four).
This is one that will be monitored closely,
along with any of the routine complete blood count levels that could indicate
an infection and/or other somatic red flags as we go along.
Infusions completed, I left the unit
feeling fairly fine, armed with new med order tweaks: alternate/titrate my
steroids, continue with antibiotics, my home self-anticoagulant injections . … and then …
I went down one floor to Radiology
for my lung CT scan. This image will be a comparative study on the change, if
any, in that tumor since my last scan and through this delayed treatment
regimen.
Results?
You’ll have to wait, as will I,
results pending for Day Sixty-Seven, when we’ll also review the findings of the
follow-up MRI for my brain tumor, due next week. Lots to know what we don’t know,
and enough for now.
Let’s see, if those two scans were
new drugs, I’d call them:
Vumorinit and Nomorinitatal.
(See what I did there?) View more in
it? No more in it at all!
More as we go, Elflexital.
