Glacial Progress

On Monday I started my fifth pack of thalidomide. I have completed four months of frontline chemotherapy. Four months since I was diagnosed. Four months of fighting. It has easily been the worst four months of my life. But the good news is, and there is no denying it, I am getting better. The progress is glacial but almost every day I feel just a little bit better than I did the day before.

I will go in to get my monthly lab work done next week that will tell how well the frontline therapy is working. I don't expect to have the results of that lab work until the week after next but my guess is that there is going to be an improvement. It is hard not to get my hopes up over that test, it really is an indicator of what my life is going to look like. I hope I am not setting my self up for disappointment here. I have always trusted what my body tells me and right now it is telling me that it is feeling better.

Last week my doctor increased my pain medication prescription. I have yet to take the extra medication. The nature of being on narcotics for a long time is that you build up a tolerance and have to keep upping your dose to get the same result. I upped my dose once about 2 months ago and have not had to up it again. Last week I came close to taking the bigger dose but I held out. Now I am glad I didn't. That is part of what makes me say that I am feeling better. I hope that in time, I'll be able to decrease the dosage.

The new news about the BMT is great. The doctor at Stanford said that he wants to see two more months of those monthly tests so the earliest that we can start the BMT is early July. My guess is that it will really start by mid July. We'll see.

With the incremental progress I feel more and more hopeful. I am starting to see a light at the end of the long dark tunnel. It is very faint and distant but it is there.