Clinical Trial, Cycle 4

Are we going back in time? Cause today I’m kicking it old school! OOOHHHH!! What do I mean by that, you ask? I mean we’re back to the good old days of me blogging about drugs, while on drugs! Now I’ll be honest, this isn’t exactly like the old days when I was blasting out blogs and crushing Percocets like your Gam Gam crushes hard candy. Rather, I’m more of an anti-anxiety drug kinda guy now. Ativan furr daayysss!! Now, I don’t like taking drugs by any stretch of the imagination, especially at work. In fact, I used to have an Ativan prescription back in the day that I would rarely use cause it made me feel loopy. But here we are, so let’s just roll with it I guess. There is (obviously) a good reason why I take drugs now, but we’ll cross that bridge in a little bit. So I finished cycle 3 of the clinical trial this Monday, and I’ll be starting cycle 4 next Monday. Remember last time when I said there weren’t really any side effects? Welp, I was very wrong there. I was right in the sense that the side effects aren’t quite as palpable like they are with chemo, though. I’m finding myself in a bit of a tricky situation, as I had scans after cycle 2, and the results were unusual for me. Typically, either the tumors grow therefore the treatment is not working, or they shrink therefore the treatment is working. Nice and easy. Just like your mom. OOHHHHH!!! He’s on fire today!!! Anyways, the results I got were that the tumors were indeed growing, but that didn’t necessarily mean that the treatment was or wasn’t working. Think of my tumors the way you think of a cut on your skin. When something is wrong, your white blood cells will amass around the afflicted area and do their thing to fix it, resulting in swelling. I actually have no idea if that’s what causes swelling, but you all believed me there didn’t you. So there are two schools of thought here. Either: 1) treatment isn’t working and my tumors are growing or 2) treatment IS working but the perceived growth in tumor size is just swelling caused by white blood cells attacking the tumors. So basically, I’ll just have to wait and see. Realistically, the tumors shouldn’t swell much more than they already are, so if my next scans are no/negative growth, then yippee for me. If there is positive growth, then it’s back to the drawing board. Again. Yaaaaay… Now, let’s talk about why I’m high right now. There’s really a lot at play. So, despite how positive and optimistic and cheery I’ve always striven to be, turns out the past couple of months of failed treatments seem to be weighing on my subconscious quite heavily, as I’ve started having panic attacks, as well as general anxiety. These can’t be contributed solely to an unlucky streak, however, as failed treatments are nothing new to me and have never elicited this type of response from me before. It seems to me, that the combination of neuropathy (numbness) in my hand and face causing stroke symptoms, combined with the prospect of a positive outlook growing bleaker by the day, as well as a host of other side effects such as chest pain, blurry vision, dizziness, joint weakness, and general fogging mental state, are all combining to put me in this position where I am forced to turn to anti-anxiety medication to give me leg up in the fight. Holy hell that was a long sentence. In any sense, the medication does help quite a bit and I still am honestly quite content in my present space, so I’m not terribly worried or upset by all of this, however it is making me feel a bit unlike myself, which is a new feeling for me. Ultimately, it comes down to two things. 1) if the treatment doesn’t work regardless, then let’s bail on it and move on before I completely lose my sense of sanity or 2) it does work which would be awesome news, and I would just need to adjust my mental state to my new paradigm of consciousness and move forward from there. It wouldn’t be overly difficult, it would just take some getting used to. Either way, it seems to me that this is an entirely win-win situation. Either I can stop being a stringed-out basket case or I can stop slowing dying. And honestly, at this point I’d be pretty happy with either outcome. So that’s where I’m at, 2 more weeks for cycle 4 then we’ll see what the scans say. To be honest, it sounds like I should be in a really dark place, but I’m not really. Like, I’m still pretty upbeat. I did sign a lease in Somerville with the gf, so that’s something fun that’s been keeping me smiling. The weather finally picking up also helps. But at the same time, the past 3 years have been an absolute fucking disaster beyond anything I could have imagined, so maybe I’m just used to it now. Maybe I’ve been kicked when I’ve been down so many times that I’m just numb to it at this point. Who knows. Either way, it really doesn’t bum me out too much and drugs are fun so let’s just keep moving and see what kind of train wreck that I can find my way into next. Maybe next time it will be a literal train wreck, that would be exciting. The train might be just too rowdy and fly off the tracks. It could be like that movie Soul Plane. I’ve never seen it, but I think it plays into the picture I’m painting pretty well. Anyways, the numbness in my hand has made me worse at typing than Stevie Wonder. Actually, I bet he’d be awesome at typing once he got the hang of it. Regardless, I’m now dog shit at typing so I need to end this cause it’s already taken me far too long to write. Later y’all! See ya after cycle 4! Go out and enjoy the weather people, and go Bruins! And boo the Red Sox. I would say make baseball fun again, but it was never fun in the first place.