Kill the Cancer

Tomorrow I go in for my fourth round of chemunotherapy, assuming that my blood counts are good enough. It looks like this will be my last round of the chemo part of the therapy, though I'll stay on the immuno part.

I won't need the first part much longer!

No one wants to show up for chemotherapy—it's downright brutal stuff. However, it needs to be brutal—brutal enough to do terrible things to my cancer. So to get myself in the right frame of mind, I've off and on been singing "kill the cancer" to the tune of Elmer Fudd's "kill the wabbit." At least it makes me smile.

Overall, I'm much encouraged by how much good the chemo seems to be doing me, though we'll need to wait for a PET scan to confirm that. At the same time, I'm worried that it might not have done as much good as it needs to, particularly given that I still get a pain when I breathe in deeply. Any part of the cancer that remains can form the seeds of its resurgence—which is what usually happens with mesothelioma. Admittedly, some of this anxiety is misplaced, as I will keep taking the immunotherapy. This immunotherapy drug, Keytruda, was approved for mesothelioma only very recently, and I am hopeful that if I am indeed the "good responder" that my oncologist thinks I am it will make a very big difference. So it's not actually the case that everything depends on tomorrow's treatment. But this is mesothelioma I'm up against, and anxiety is not always avoidable. 

Meanwhile, I did get my taxes done, so that's one less thing to worry about.