My apology again to those whose who are following my blog that I had not posted for quite a while now. It is progressively getting more difficult for me to focus on writing due to the pain and discomfort. I will be making 2 posts today, this one that focuses largely on my clinical condition and another where I will focus largely on my thoughts.
The last 2 weeks was terrible and “terrible” might be an understatement. I was not able to sleep well because of the pain and discomfort and somehow the pain and discomfort were more pronounced at night when I try to sleep. It could be that there were no distractions like TV such that all attentions were focused back onto the body and I start to notice the pain and discomfort more. For the Radiation Gastritis, it is progressive getting better although not as fast as I would have hoped. I am getting less of the bloated feeling and I can consume more food (quantity-wise per meal) but the condition is still in a sort of flux and I got good days and bad days. Last night was quite bad and the total hours of peaceful sleep I got from 12:15am till 7:30am this morning was roughly about 3 hours. The remaining of the time, I was in a half-sleep zone and getting out of bed every now and then and moved about just to elevate some of the discomfort. The only fortunate thing is that during the day I seem to be able to catch up on my sleep.
I am still losing weight and this morning, I had crossed the sub-50kg mark with my weight at 49.6kg. It translate to me having less energy and physically less desire to move about although psychologically I do try to motivate myself to move about at least in the morning by sending Nathan to school and occasionally heading out in the afternoon for a short while just to occupy myself. I went a watch World War Z at the cinema yesterday. Again, it is one of those distractions that I had at least for a few hours.
I had my CT-Scan done last week on Tuesday and I saw my Medical Oncologist on 8 July, Monday. The good news is that the stents are where they are supposed to be and still functioning as what they are supposed to. The bad news is that the cancer had metastasised again to the liver with multiple ill-defined hypodense lesions in both lobes of the liver. The pancreatic tumor appears to be larger but not really very conclusive as it is sort of like a “blob” being inseparable from part of the stomach and intestine. There seem to be a “hypodense” area within the pancreatic tumor and it could represent “necrosis”.
What does all these means?
My Med-Oncologist is not too concern at this point about the Liver lesions/metastasis as he says we can make do with even just 1/3 of a liver. He is somewhat concerned about the pancreatic tumor and will be targeting treatment on that region. Since it would seem that the previous chemo-drugs used are appearing to be losing their effectiveness, the treatment is going to be switched to a more traditional drug Gemcitabine used for treating Pancreatic Cancer. I will be having 2 cycles of therapies with each cycle consisting of 3 treatments (once a week) and a week rest before staring the next cycle. The first treatment will be this Friday. I am trying to psych myself up for the treatment because I do not know how “bad” the side-effects will be considering my current weaken state and the ongoing discomfort I have with the stomach.
I had a follow-up with my Radiation-Oncologist on the same day and I got a little optimistic after seeing him. I kept asking him if the “necrosis” could mean that the tumor is “dying” but he was trying not to be committal about it because I think it is still really too early to tell. He was saying that the effect of the radiation from the Radio-Therapy could last up to 12 weeks after the last therapy session (my last session was on 31 May) and we would need to wait and see how the situation develop especially now that I am going to start on chemotherapy again.
In any case, I do not sense the same optimism from both my Med- and Rad-Oncologist as I have from April of this year but I will still have to go through the treatment as it will provide some hope. In the meanwhile, the pain is really getting to me and I am finding it hard to tolerate it, this despite the increasing dose of pain killer. The Fentanyl pain killer patch is now 50mcg instead of 37.5 and my consumption of morphine is more regular and frequent now. I believe the main pain is coming from the tumor and lesser from the gastritis. I can also only pray and hope that this pain is from the tumor in the grip of a death-roll.
In God We Trust and in Christ alone my hope is found.
Hebrews 11:1
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