Ninth round

Today we had another doctor's appointment and afterwards I started the ninth round of chemotherapy. Surprise, we were called in by yet another doctor we haven't met before. She was quite young and said all decisions are made by the senior doctor that we were told last time would become our fixed doctor. This appointment was obviously considered a routine follow-up that the junior doctor could easily handle. Well, she did handle it well, but there wasn't any new info really. Only the standard blood tests were taken last Friday and all values are still pretty much the same they have been since July. That's good, as usually they of course tend to get worse during chemotherapy.

My wife had as usual a long list of questions. Some of them were so tricky the junior doctor said we'd better ask the senior doctor. My wife asked when does the surgeon look at the CT scan pictures to see if a resection or radio frequency ablation of the liver tumours would be possible. The doctor replied that the senior doctor goes to surgeons' meetings and brings forth cases as he sees fit. We'll put this down on our questions list for next appointment as we expect to see our fixed doctor again then.

The senior doctor had confirmed before the meeting that we will continue with the same medication this round. However, we had an interesting discussion regarding one of the medicines, oxaliplatin (Eloxatin). The doctor told us that the long-term side effect, namely neuropathy (loosing feeling in fingers and feet) from oxaliplatin, tends to start getting worse from eight or ninth round of chemo, and they then need to consider if they should stop that chemo so that the damage to the nerves does not get bad. I have increasingly had the problem of numbness in my fingers, and I got my ninth round of chemo today. They may have to drop oxaliplatin soon. The doctor said that then they will continue with capesitabin (Xeloda) and Avastin only. They are effective drugs by themselves too, but of course they would then monitor if the tumours would start growing again, in which case they would add some other chemo to the treatment.

The next treatment is three weeks from now. Five weeks from there, on February 16th, there will be a CT scan. Until then there will not be very exciting news I am afraid.