Chemotherapy has officially begun. So far it just feels like a fairly bad case of the flu. I really can’t complain, considering it is chemotherapy, and it’s only for 5 days at a time. I didn’t sleep very well Monday night, which was the first night I started, so I wasn’t feeling well much of the day yesterday. Thankfully, my niece was able to take the kids for the day so that I could get some rest. From the experiences that I have read online from other people, most of them say that the first 2 days are the worst, and then your body adapts….I guess.
After a week of processing the fact that this tumor is growing, I’m very at peace with our decision of how to move forward. We are going to attack this thing from several different angles. One of the things that becomes a challenge in treating cancer is that at some point, a lot of cancers will become chemo-resistant. Even though cancer cells are a more fragile cell than normal cells, they are very smart. They figure out ways to “hide” from therapies that are trying to attack them. This is often why a patient will experience stability or shrinkage of their tumor, but then all of a sudden the cancer starts growing, again, even while on chemotherapy. There is an inspirational story that you can read here, about a man that had the most aggressive brain tumor one can have (Glioblastoma), with a life expectancy of 6 months to 1 year. This was in 1995, and the man is still alive today. He ended up incorporating his own cocktail to treat his cancer. He, much like I, was very involved in the decision making process of what his treatment regimen would entail. The difference between what he did and what I’ll be doing, is that he incorporated a lot of different drugs that were being used to treat GBMs. Since I don’t have a Glioblastoma, but a lower grade tumor, I wouldn’t qualify for most of those things, and I have chosen to try some “softer” therapies. These therapies have been shown to compliment Temodar, as well as offset the immuno-suppressant side-effects of the drug. Boosting your immune system is very important for a cancer patient. It’s ultimately your immune system that will win the battle against your cancer for you. Because cancer treatments are extremely immuno-suppressive, I will do whatever I can to boost my immune system back up, through mostly natural therapies.