More Chemo

The results of my most recent PET scan are in, and they are mixed. I still have two active, cancerous nodes. One is less active than the last time; one is slightly more active than the last time. Not larger - they're all much smaller than they were. But active.

My doctors believe that it would be best to have more chemo before the transplant attempt; they want the cancerous nodes as dead as possible before swinging the Big Hammer at them. Fair enough, but it seems somehow predictable that just as I was starting to feel pretty good I'd have to go back under chemo. (Various people use various words to describe this. Some "take" chemo. Some are "on" chemo. Some "do" chemo. For me, "under" chemo seems the most accurate, capturing as it does the sense of having something heavy weighing one down.)

I don't know which sort of chemo yet. Surely not ABVD, since I already did that. I hope not ESHAP, which has proven in my case to be pretty effective but also pretty destructive. It takes me weeks to get over ESHAP in any meaningful way, and I'm not looking forward to losing all the strength I've gained back to another round of ESHAP. But I'm not a doctor, and if they think ESHAP is best, well, I guess that's what we'll do. But I don't have to be happy about it.

Last evening the neighbor's miniature dachshund ran away from home. As a small dog like that would be little more than a snack to the area coyotes, we turned out to help in the search. I wandered around out in the desert with a large flashlight for a meaningfully long time before I got tired, and even then, I didn't get mortally tired, I just sort of ran out of juice. It was nice to be able to do that, and to know that even though I could wear myself out, I wasn't pushing the edge of passing out. But now I'll have to do more ESHAP and I'll be right back in the same boat, bedbound and so weak that a walk to the water cooler is more work than I can manage.

Oh well. One does as one must.

PS: After everyone had given up the search, the little dog came home on his own, thirsty and dusty from his big adventure but unharmed.