A Damped Christmas

Special Christmas greetings to all!

After a pre-Christmas wedding that we attended in upstate New York (see photo), Christmas in our house was a rather damped affair this year. Gita came down with a cold on Christmas Eve, so as we opened our presents on Christmas morning we placed an air filter between us. Otherwise, she spent several days holed up in her room, alternating between resting and knitting. So far neither Anand nor I have gotten the cold, but we may have been fighting it, as we both joined Gita in feeling pretty washed out and unambitious for several days. I did manage to make the desserts on Christmas Day, though.

Attending a Christmas-season wedding

In general, I continue to get tired very easily these days. Luckily, I enjoy reading, so I have something to do when I'm lying around. Usually I read fiction, but lately I've been reading about cancer. Last winter, when my diagnosis was new, I would not have done this: it was too sore a subject. But somehow things are different now. Thus I recently read Theresa Brown's Healing: When a Nurse Becomes a Patient, the memoir of a breast cancer survivor, and now I'm in the middle of Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. The former contained a lot of feelings and experiences I could relate to as well as a number of things I couldn't. For one thing, Brown speaks of a post-cancer life, something I can no longer easily imagine. I guess I am adjusting to my new normal. Mukherjee's book is a detailed look at efforts to understand and battle cancer. I'm at about the year 2005 in the story, and the tide is turning. Targeted therapies are coming along, which target cancer cells specifically rather than poisoning all cells indiscriminately as older forms of chemotherapy did. The checkpoint inhibitors (the kind of immunotherapy I'm on) are a few chapters in the future still, I think. It reminds me that I am very glad not to have gotten cancer any earlier. These are the days of miracles, as Paul Simon says.

On the gardening front, my cousin sent me a sprout-growing kit and some broccoli seeds. It turns out that broccoli (especially in sprout form) is full of cancer-fighting compounds. So I am happily growing things and tending my health at the same time. How's that for win–win?

Stopping Meso

One year ago today I spent the afternoon in the emergency room. Since then I've had a hospitalization, a biopsy, a diagnosis, four rounds of chemotherapy, and nine rounds of immunotherapy, with a tenth coming tomorrow. The result of all that is that for now, I'm stable. Compared to last year, I know worse things about my condition but I am receiving much better care for it. So it's complicated.

My Christmas cactus and I are both still here.

I'm learning to live with cancer, and the fear and disorientation of the first few weeks and months after my diagnosis have faded. It tears at my heart, though, when I hear of newly diagnosed patients. Each new patient experiences their own round of fear and pain. At the symposium we attended in October, we learned that people are getting mesothelioma at younger ages, even down to the age of 8. 

Unlike many cancers, mesothelioma has a specific, preventable cause: asbestos exposure. In past times asbestos was commonly used in building materials, sometimes intentionally as a fire-retardant and sometimes unintentionally as contamination of other products. Thus the fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11 released considerable quantities of asbestos dust into the air and is expected to result in an upsurge in mesothelioma cases as the latency period of 10 to 50 years progresses. My own exposure appears to be through the contamination of vermiculite insulation.

It is too late to do anything about asbestos exposure in the past, but we should be able to stop it in the present and future. An apparently innocent ongoing source of asbestos exposure is talcum powder, accounting for an increase in mesothelioma cases among women. Most talc-based cosmetics are contaminated with asbestos because the two minerals often naturally occur in conjunction with each other. Disturbingly, the FDA has recently withdrawn its proposed rule requiring the testing of talc-based cosmetics for asbestos. In other words, asbestos exposure is not being stopped. More people are going to get cancer.

What can we do? Here are a few steps to take:

1. Opt for cornstarch-based rather than talc-based cosmetics and baby powder.
2. Urge your elected officials to push for renewed FDA standards for talcum powder.
3. Support the advocacy, patient support, and research efforts of the Mesothelioma Applied Research Foundation. You can do that through my fundraising page at this link.

I know I've asked before, and many of you have responded—thank you! But if there is anyone out there who is wondering where to direct a year-end gift, might I suggest this cause? Mesothelioma should be preventable. And hopefully it will soon be curable, too!

Birthday and Thanksgiving

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've gotten a bit twitchy this year about my birthday. Medical people have been asking me my birthday all year. Then, when I answer, they inject me with something: chemotherapy or immunotherapy drugs, radioactive sugar, or CT contrast material. So it was good to have my birthday come and have it be a cause for celebration—with no injections! 

My birthday, with no needles!

Thanksgiving was also a cause for celebration. We had family and friends and lots of good food. In keeping with my custom in recent years, I harvested carrots that day. I otherwise left most of the food preparation to others, ably spearheaded by Gita.

Thanksgiving carrot harvest

Plentiful food prepared by others

We had a full house of family and friends for both Thanksgiving and my birthday. It was wonderful to see everyone, and a great joy to me to have gotten this far. I certainly had things to be thankful for on Thanksgiving, with the improvement in my health over this time last year. It was exhausting, though. I find I have very little stamina, and I keep being surprised at just how quickly I get tired. This week my priority is rest.