Provenge Sequence: Treatment #4 of 6

Monday, February 19

In about an hour (about 10:30 a.m.) we'll head once again up to Seidman Cancer Center in University Circle, where I will lie on a comfortable sort of recliner, get hooked up to a plastic bag full of my own energized T-cells, which have spent the weekend in Atlanta getting high on a drug (Provenge), a drug that will empower those cells to do a better job of fighting my metastatic prostate cancer (bones now).

Of the two procedures--withdrawal, return--this (the return) is far more "pleasant"--though that's hardly an adequate word. I think it should go even more smoothly today because, as I wrote the other day, I now have a catheter near the right side of my neck (with a tube from it running right into my heart! like a lover!). Everyone (who knows) says that it will happen more quickly than it did the previous time when they used one of the veins in my right arm. I hope so.

Not that I mind lying on a comfortable recliner, mind you. (I am retired, you know!) But I want to get all of this over. When I finish the treatment today, I will have only one more pair to undergo: one more withdrawal (a week from Tuesday at the Akron Red Cross), one more infusion (a week from Friday back at Seidman). And when it is all over next Friday, I think I may have to celebrate. Maybe eat two apples before supper instead of one? Nah, that sounds a little too wild for me ...

Joyce, I am sure, will be thrilled, as well, to see the end of this. Since this has started, she has been my chauffeur (at times), my bath-assistant (ever since I got this catheter), the beating heart beside me while I go through all of this. Oh, and she's been the photographer, too--taking photos of the process (not that I would otherwise forget!). I want those pictures. Badly.

Anyway, I will add a bit more to this when I return later this afternoon ....

PAUSE

Tuesday, February 20

Well, the best-laid plans of mice and men ... Old Bobby Burns knew a thing or a thousand, didn't he? We left the house at 10:30 yesterday and got to Seidman in plenty of time for the scheduled infusion at 12 noon.

But ...

Two things were immediate problems:

1. I learned that the type of catheter they inserted in me last week is good only for the Red Cross withdrawals; it's too big for the infusion. (There is another type of catheter they could have inserted that would have accommodated both procedures.) So ... stick a little, talk a little, stick a little talk a little, stick-stick-stick, talk a lot, pick a little more... (with apologies to Meredith Willson & The Music Man). So ... it actually took only two sticks to get a vein in my right arm to accommodate the infusion of my own pumped-up T-cells.
2. The T-cells, scheduled to arrive about 12:30, did not appear until about 1:30. We were all beginning to wonder if they were going to show up at all. During the infusion I talked with J, ran through (silently) some of the poems I've memorized, worked on memorizing a new one (see note below).

And then I learned that after the infusion (which takes about an hour) we would celebrate by my receiving two major injections:

1. Xgeva (pronounced x-JEE-vuh), a monthly injection I get to increase bone strength--for a couple of reasons ... 
1. My cancer has metastasized into my bones.
2. The next injection I get (see below) can weaken bones.
3. I get this shot in my triceps area--and for some reason it invariably hurts like a bad word I won't write on this Family Site.
2. Lupron (LOO-prawn), a quarterly injection (in a butt cheek). Lupron hates testosterone, kills it--a good thing: The prostate cancer cells love testosterone)--but a bad thing in just about every other way. (See earlier posts about this drug.)

Finally, it was all over. I had sticks and pricks in my right arm (for the blood withdrawal, for Xgeva), in my left butt cheek--and, of course, the catheter, which, by the way, the nurse cleaned and sanitized: can't take chances with a device with a tube leading directly into my heart ...  She also changed the dressing, peeling away a big piece of tape--also invariably fun, eh?

Anyway, Joyce (my hero) drove home in the pouring rain on the cusp of Rush Hour. (I will resist making a metaphorical weather point here.) We arrived a little after 4:30 and immediately began preparation for supper.

I had a grilled cheese and tomato soup (one of the meals I cannot remember ever not having now and then), and I used some Tillamook cheese that I'd bought at Heinen's on Sunday, the same cheese that reminds me of my father, the same cheese that occasioned a Facebook poem I posted on February 10 (see below), the same cheese that dampened my eyes with each bite last night as I thought of my father, of all that has fled.

Yesterday, getting my own T-cells back
through my right arm.

*In the picture above you can see in my left hand a 3x5 card on which are some lines from Millay's "Renascence," a long poem I'm trying to memorize. An appropriate title, eh?

Tears in Heinen’s

February 4, 2018

A grocery store is not the place

Where you’re supposed to cry.

You fill your cart, insert your card,

Go home with what you buy.

But here I stand, tears in my eyes,

Beside a counter where

They slice some turkey, slice some cheese,

Slice other kinds of fare.

I’m waiting here for Joyce, who’s back

In produce (favorite spot!).

She’s picking through the vegetables

To choose what must be bought.

My eyes drift to the counter where

I stop—a closer look.

I read the label on some cheese—

And I read “Tillamook.”

And that’s the word that brings the tears,

Makes me profoundly sad.

For “Tillamook” I cannot see

And not think of my dad.

He loved that cheese—loved Oregon,

Where he was born and raised,

Where he then went to live again,

Where he then sat and gazed

In his retirement at the sea,

At coastal mountains, too.

And Tillamook (the town) was near—

The Head was in his view.*

Each week he’d buy some Tillamook—

Consume it all week long.

And later—when they had to move—

He knew it would be wrong

If he then gave up Tillamook,

And so he never would.

In Massachusetts, where they went,

There was no likelihood

That I would visit, find him low

Of cheese from Tillamook.

He watched his football, ate the cheese

While Mom just read a book.

And then in 1999

My father passed away.

He’s left me fatherless until

My own last dying day.

I think about him all the time—

And often with a sigh—

So seeing “Tillamook” today?

My only choice—to cry.

*Tillamook Head; Cannon Beach, OR