Upcoming appointments and a haircut

There’s nothing too exciting to report on here, but I thought I’d let you know of a couple appointments coming up that I’m looking forward to.

This Monday evening I’m getting another brain MRI. You may recall that I had a brain MRI right before my Gamma Knife procedure on January 22nd and then another on February 22nd, and a comparison of those two MRIs showed that the metastatic lesion in my brain had shrunk significantly, from 9mm to 6mm. The MRI this coming Monday will be compared with the February 22nd MRI to determine if that lesion is continuing to shrink, staying unchanged, or growing. I don’t know when I’ll get the result, but I’ll update this blog when I do.

The second upcoming appointment is with my oncologist on April 20th. She’ll either want me to continue a few more chemo treatments, or temporarily discontinue chemo but continue with the immunotherapy, or she may come up with some other treatment plan. I’m hoping of course that she’ll temporarily discontinue the chemo treatments because I really need to recover from the disabling fatigue that the chemo causes. But I know she’ll recommend whatever is best for me in the long run.

My last chemo treatment was on March 30th and in the 12 days since then the only side effects I’ve noticed have been fatigue and itching. The fatigue started the day after the chemo, got worse over the next three or four days until I could barely function, and then started gradually subsiding. I still take at least two or three naps a day and get really tired in the evening but compared with chemo side effects many people suffer from, this is nothing to complain about.

The itching is caused not by the two chemo drugs but by the immunotherapy drug. They gave me a shot right after the last immunotherapy treatment that was supposed to prevent itching. It worked really well. I had some itching in both lower legs the evening after that treatment, but hydrocortisone ointment fixed that. There’s been no itching since then.

On perhaps a more interesting note, I got my first haircut today since losing most of my hair after my first chemo treatment. No, my hair hasn’t start growing back (it won’t until a few weeks after my last chemo treatment) but I had a lot of stray hairs sticking up all over the top of my head that gave me an unkempt look. So Joanie took me into our back yard and using a pair of scissors and the trimmer attachment from my electric shaver, gave me her very first haircut. She did a great job; it looks much better now.



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