Cancer

Hi everyone! I'm back and I'll bet you may be wondering about the title of this post. Am I referring to the constellation Cancer (Latin for crab)? Am I designing a crab-shaped rocket? No, it's a considerable bit less cool than that. I have CLL/SLL (chronic lymphocytic leukemia/small lymphocyte lymphoma). I was originally diagnosed a little over a year ago. My cancer is supposedly indolent (slow growing) and usually some other disease process kills CLL patients before the cancer ever does. I underwent 6 cycles of chemotherapy, ending last February.The chemo sucked, but it seemed to work - a CT scan on December 30 showed complete resolution of all the enlarged lymph nodes previously seen.

So I go back to the oncologist for a follow-up yesterday and when I weighed in I had lost 15 pounds over the past two months, without trying at all - down from #169 to #154. I was very surprised, as was the oncologist. While I've not noticed any swollen lymph nodes anywhere or anything like that, I have been having a lot of intense night sweats over the past couple of weeks. I hadn't really thought about those being related to cancer but when he asked if I'd been having any, I thought, "Oh crap - I have been having those again." 

So anyhow he's ordered CT scans of my chest/abdomen/pelvis again and I get those done Tuesday 07 July 2020. Meanwhile all we (Bridgid & I) can do is...wait. But unfortunately I also tend to speculate a lot and this turn of events is alarming, IMHO, because I never lost any weight before I had chemotherapy. But now I've lost fifteen pounds. So clearly there is some very active metabolism going on somewhere down in there, but the question is what's doing the metabolizing? The original malignancy didn't cause ANY weight loss. So my theory is that the chemo killed off everything except for an extremely malevolent clone of cells which has now bloomed, or else perhaps I have a second primary - colon is what I suspect. Anyhow I'm closing this post and publishing it, I just needed to write about the cancer and I'll get back to rockets ASAP! Be well.