August 8th, 2018

By the time I paid attention to blogging, most of the really popular, successful bloggers I started following posted only once every month or two. These were long, usually a few-thousand-word posts that could easily be sermons or TED talks or chapters of a book. I missed the phase of blogging that started it all, when people posted regularly and often about their lives, about what they were doing, what they were thinking, even and especially if they didn't have answers to the questions they pondered.

I felt like my blog needed to meet the standards I thought was required of all blogs. I tried to write long posts weighted far more to the reflection and insight side of things, rather than the journaling and recording side. I've always wanted the theme of my blog to be cancer and faith and how those topics together intersect with other areas of my life. So that's what I've done. The problem is I only had so many grand insights that felt blogworthy, and I've since compiled these ideas into a book I'm trying to get published, so at this point I don't feel like trying to maintain a blog like that is sustainable.

But that doesn't necessarily mean I don't have any interesting thoughts or an interesting life, or at least, some things going on that might be worth writing about. So, after some time off with a bunch of complications from treatment(?) and who knows why else going on, I’m ready to get back into blogging. I've spent a lot of time rethinking what I want to do in this space, and I've decided to try to post much more often, with much lower standards for myself. I'm not going to worry about having a point at all, much less some sweeping new insight. I'm just going to record bits of what life with cancer looks like.

So today, I write this in my phone as I'm hooked up to an IV for hydration. I had a biopsy sample Monday, part of the protocol for the immunotherapy clinical trial I'm on. That biopsy involved heavy sedation, since they had to stick a big, hollow needle into my back to grab a piece of tumor tissue. Sedation meant nothing to eat or drink from midnight Sunday night until about 4:30 Monday afternoon. Which meant I got fairly under-hydrated. Perhaps as a result of that, some of my pancreatic and liver function numbers were off yesterday and I couldn't get treatment. Nobody really knows why these numbers have been fluctuating so much lately, but that seems to be my new normal.

I've had a bunch of IV fluids the last 24 hours yet somehow also lost around 2 or 3 kilograms (about 5-7lbs) since yesterday, again mystifying the doctors. It might be as simple as a broken scale yesterday, and while that's not especially likely it is more probable than me actually losing a bunch of weight overnight. But the important thing is my pancreas and liver numbers have dropped enough following hydration that I can get more of the clinical trial drug, which they're mixing up now and will infuse shortly.

It takes half an hour for the first drug, which hopefully boosts immune system activity, then a half hour break, then the actual immunotherapy drug, then a couple hours of monitoring and further hydration. It'll be a long day here at the hospital. I'll go back to The Ronald McDonald House tonight with a hydration backpack, which hopefully helps me avoid some of the complications I had during the first round of this experimental treatment. We'll see!