This was originally an email written to my family and friends on the date above. I decided to make these public in the event they may be helpful to someone in the future who is embarking on a similar journey to mine.
3 weeks ago things were going so well with my back pain that I was backing off my meds and thinking about how best to up my physical activity. Last week I got hit by the proverbial truck. Thankfully, I’m already making progress managing coming out the other side.
My current cancer treatment (Regorafenib) has a 3 week on, 1 week off dosing schedule. I had actually run a little long so took my off week after 4 weeks on. That off week corresponded with nearly a full return of my back pain. Primarily muscular pain. I got some relief from acupuncture but also heavily ramped up my pain meds and was frequently using the morphine for “breakthrough” pain on top of the pain patches.
I started up my Regorafenib treatment again on Friday last week and already managed to have a real night’s sleep on Saturday night (last night was a little rougher, but was still a huge improvement over the previous week). We aren’t sure how the Regorafenib is helping here, but I’ll take it. I’m having a scan today. It’s a little early to really see what the Regorafenib may be doing in terms of it’s effectiveness, but my doctor wanted to take a peek and see how things are coming along.
I’m hoping to hear back from the National Cancer Institute on a few possible clinical trials this week, and have made good progress through the rest of the list. As expected, many of the trials were not a good fit (only enrolling breast cancer patients now, only open to patients with genetic marker X, etc.) but many of them offered other possible trials. I hope we’ll be working with the doctors to evaluate options here in the near term to see what our next steps should be, given the options from the trial research.
So that’s the update – a pretty rough week, but doing better again now. Hopefully things will continue to improve as before, and we’ll be a little more cautious about the next “off week” from treatment.
Oh – and I hope you’re all watching the World Series; it’s been great so far!
This post is part of the thread: Cancer – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.