Round 4

Today is the first day of my fourth round of chemo.  It's been a pretty quiet day so far with only rain storms and a very talkative man in the bed across from me interrupting the peace and somewhat quiet.  Chris, the talker and a very nice guy, has stage four esophageal cancer.  He and his wife are hoping that the chemo and radiation will work and he'll be enough to go on their big trip to Jamaica.  Today is actually his last day receiving chemo, but he doesn't seem very optimistic about life.  We talked for awhile when his wife was getting breakfast and he told me that he wasn't afraid to die and was almost a gift to know you're going to die. Now he has to wait two months to see whether the treatment worked or not.  I'm not sure what to think about Chris, but it was interesting having a candid conversation with someone who likely has terminal cancer.  It helped me put things in perspective a bit since I have completely opposite feelings about my cancer since I am banking everything on being cured by the end of treatment.  My next round of scans should be informative on how effective my treatment has been so far.

I'm getting about every scan there is before my surgery.  I have two MRI's, a CT, a bone scan, and a PET scan set up for next week.  I've had all of them but the bone scan before, and it will be interesting to see how much bone is left in my cancerous vertebrae.  I'll know the results next Thursday morning with more pictures to be put up on the blog after.  They'll be some delay since I'm leaving town immediately after the meeting to go to the dev bio dept retreat.  I'm happy that I can still do some traveling this summer even if that means just to the 'resort' in the boonies west of STL.