Lila had to present herself at the hospital this morning at 5:30 to be checked in and checked over for the procedure placing a catheter in one of the veins leading to her heart through which they docs can administer the chemo drugs, plus the other stuff she'll need to take IV during the rest of the treatments. It's this thingy: a sub-dermal port attached to a catheter.
They finished installing it, but without enough time for her to completely recover from the anaestesia before she was due to get her (last) radiation treatment of this cycle. (Addendum, July 4) She said they more or less 'forced' her out from under so they could trundle her over to get her radiation on schedule. She said she felt the after-effects of that the rest of the day, and it was that, I'm guessing, that made her sound so weak on the phone.
Apparently there is more radiation in the offing. As she told me her radiologist told her, tests won't confirm or deny anything for a matter of a month or more. This course did not address the symptoms/diagnosis for the bone metastasis in her neck. (End Add., 7/4) She has an appointment with her Oncologist on Wednesday, and her next chemo on Friday next. I've asked her to look at some of the things that I've turned up, and ask her Docs about 'em. Especially the treatment focusing on the white blood cells, the granulocytes, which is being tested locally already.
We talked only for a few minutes, five or six, mebbe 10 at the most. She sounded tired and week as a kitten. She says she's found a way to fall asleep, and I think I understand how it works, but I doubt I can explain it. But that is GREAT news. She needs to sleep to gain her strength. Being unable to sleep weakens her, which is not a good thing...
So things will be uneventful until Wednesday, at least. I will this weekend start to draft a letter to the Oncology researcher named in the CTv piece on granulocytes, who's in Lila's general vicinity, familiarizing him with her situation, and asking him to please consider my babe for any future trials he may have set for the procedure. It looks to me from some vid I've seen, this therapy might be effective against active, metastasized cancers.
I mentioned to her today that I wished she had an advocate there for her, a third person who was always on the cases of the treatment folks to think hard about her. House (et al--Lila likes "House") notwithstanding, it seems likely to me that folks doing this treatment stuff on a daily basis must fall victim to a kind of routinization, to start to view each case through a sort of 'normalizing'--and 'objectifying'--lens. When you got death on the doorstep everyday, eventually, one suspects, the novelty wears off. Clinical folks get accustomed to doing things, mebbe in just one way, and grow brittle or atrophied in their constancy. Mebbe they grow a little complacent. They may lose that sense of immediacy. I told her I thought she needed the kind of a guy on her team there who wouldn't let anybody get complacent: somebody who wasn't afraid to make noise, like, say, to get arrested at a baseball game for saying "fuck" or calling a cop a moron...Hmmmm (dramatically strokes long beard as if pondering deeply) I wonder who....
Oh, yeah, that'd be me...funny thing...heh
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