Goodish Badish Noneish News

Ok… uh… I’m really not sure whether this is good or bad news — it sounds like the good news is not as good as we thought, but the bad news doesn’t exist either, and we shouldn’t have been expecting any news at this point, so the fact that we don’t really have bad or good news is not news.

The word “news” has lost all meaning.

So here is Stacey’s performance art piece entitled…

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Of Liver Values and Human Beings

I need to retract just about all of the last post. Well, the info Deb gave you on SGOT and SGPT is right, but the levels didn’t really go down. Also, the drop in the tumor marker never really happened. Sigh.

First, the tumor markers. It seems that TFDB misread one of the reports, or took one value from column A and one value from column B, or something. This is where the human being thing comes in. I met with her last week and it turns out that she doesn’t even remember having the conversation. One value did drop from 30 to 29, but nothing dropped from 30 to 20. In fact, I learned that it takes from 8 to 12 treatments with Navelbine before any results are expected. That might have been nice to know going in, I guess.

Maybe I should ask more questions, but we’re treading very close to questions I don’t actually want answered, you know? Questions with answers that I know I’m not going to like, so I don’t ask them. Sometimes that means that other questions don’t get asked, like, “When will we start to see results?” Oh, well. Can’t really get mad at her for the misinformation, though, because I’m sure it was just an honest mistake. I’ll probably ask to see the numbers next time, though.

I was a little bummed when I realized that the drop never happened and no real change has happened yet. I pulled out of the MGH parking garage and started crying a little bit, but then realized that it’s hard to drive in Boston with your eyes all teary, so I cut that shit out. No time to be weepy when people want to run you off the road. Later, I was over it, so no crying.

The deal with the LFTs (what we shall evermore use to refer to Liver Function Tests) is that they’ll keep going up until the Navelbine starts killing off the cancer cells in the liver. If they go up too high, however, then there’s too much toxicity in the system and the Navelbine is halted. It’s a Catch-22, like for reals, because giving the Navelbine makes the levels go up, too, at least until it makes them go down. They held the Navelbine the week before last because of this. I went to see her last Tuesday and she decided that as long as they’re under 300 and everything else looks fine (bilirubin is important in this decision making process) then they’ll go ahead and treat. So it’s like finding out whether or not you’ve won the lottery every Friday. This past Friday I did win (the LFTs actually did go down, more of a short term fluctuation) and did get the Navelbine. Interestingly I haven’t had any nausea with it lately. Fine by me.

So, the lesson here is that people make mistakes and chemo takes longer to kick in than you’d like. I’m not happy with either situation, but what can you do, you know?

In more important news: I’m very unhappy with the Thai options in the MetroWest area. I’d like to find a place with a strong pad thai, but also a good crispy roll and Silver Noodles. This has become critically important, for some reason. Any suggestions?

Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving!

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