It seems that life is full of ups and downs, good and bad, and tragedy and miracles. One of my favorite quotes is from Forest Gump, “life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get.” It seems like that has been our family motto for a while now. Our expectation coming down here was to steel ourselves for some bad news. Just to fill you in on some of what has been going on in the past few months, it has definitely been trying to say the least. About a month ago Tammy had a severe reaction to her oxalaplatin drug. This consisted of something like severe hives. She described it as her body being on fire. This came on after only eleven minutes of after starting that drug. She is fine, they gave her drugs to counteract and after an hour and a half she was pretty close back to normal and they let her go home. Her doctors had warned her that this could happen when you go back and retry drugs for the second time. She was on oxalaplatin her very first go round back at the beginning. Long story short she will probably never get that drug again. For us that is ok, but it does create another problem in that basically she is running out of drugs in the colon cancer standard of care realm, translated-ones that they know work. There is one drug left in the standard of care, it is called Stivarga, and none of the doctors seem real gung ho about using it because the benefit seems to be very small. In our minds, that left us with clinical trials. Our expectation coming down here was that cancer has grown because of not getting the treatments because of reaction, and moving on to clinical trials because there is nothing else. To say that we have been uptight would be an understatement.
Now back to that box of chocolates. When the doctor came in and showed us the scans I think we were both somewhat in awe. There has been no growth in her spots in her lungs, and the area in her abdomen has stayed the same. I think the results in her abdomen had even the doctor a little stumped. He said as fast as it came on he expected there to be some change in it, but there wasn’t. His recommendation at this time is to take a break from everything. No chemo for two months. Then they will check it again and evaluate what to do from that point on. We were definitely not expecting that piece of chocolate to fall out of the box. Tammy is very excited about this. She has been on chemo for a long time; the only breaks have been during surgery.
Cancer is a world of mixed blessings. We are excited that she gets a break, but also nervous about what might happen in that time. For the last few days I have been trying to organize, filter, and really get a sense of what my true feelings about this are. I’m still struggling a little bit with how I feel, but one thing that this appointment has definitely taught me is that if we get so worked up about what we expect to happen, we are not focused oh what was really important at the time. I need to be thankful in the moment and when that miracle chocolate falls out, enjoy it to its fullest.