Four Months and Counting

Today (June 11) marks the four-month anniversary of Deb’s surgery. I’m sure that some of you are having a hard time believing that it has been that long, but to us it seems like a very long time indeed.

Over the past couple weeks I’ve been pinged by several people wondering why I haven’t sent out an update recently. The answer is that the news has slowed down so much that it takes a long time to accumulate something worth passing on. Basically, all the trends I’ve been writing about in my past few updates have continued: Deb is now working her normal half-time schedule. We take long walks for exercise when the weather allows – it has been raining almost every day for about a month now – and though her stamina has gradually built up, it still needs work. The lung that collapsed during surgery is still not completely back to normal. Gleevec is not producing any side effects worth complaining about – a little swelling in the ankles and occasional indigestion.

Stamina, of course, is relative. Deb’s current shape is not unusual for an American woman who will turn 50 in a few months. We have taken on-the-level walks of two hours, and Sunday we took advantage of a rare sunny day by hiking a mildly hilly trail in the Middlesex Fells for 90 minutes. Deb did fine, but was tired all day Monday. That’s typical; she bounces back more slowly than she did before surgery.

I had thought her lung was getting better, but today we saw Deb’s radiologist, Carolyn Lamb, who listened to her breathing and said that it still wasn’t right. The lung itself is clear, but the lining around it is swollen so that the lung doesn’t get to expand all the way. Eventually she may have to have fluid drained from it with a big needle, but she’s in no hurry to make that happen. (I should point out: There are no plans for radiation, but Deb still sees Dr. Lamb once a year because of the radiation treatment she had for breast cancer in 1997. The child Dr. Lamb was pregnant with at the first follow-up will start kindergarten next year.)

The psychological news is that Deb and I exchanged roles a little over a week ago: Deb became the optimist and I became the pessimist. (This is probably good, because Deb’s intuition is better than mine.) When Gleevec first came into the picture, I immediately assumed this was the solution, while Deb had the typically Catholic response that salvation does not come so easily. Last time, the breast cancer was only beaten after nine months of death-defying chemotherapy and exhausting radiation, so why should this time be different? Sometime in early June, she started getting used to the idea that she could get off easy, that Gleevec was really going to work.

At about the same time, I was watching a news report on two new cancer drugs that have nothing to do with us. Everyone seemed very excited, and it made me realize how little it takes to get people excited about new treatments. The new drug (avastin, I think) was a thrilling success because people who otherwise would have died in 14 months managed to last for 20 months. That brought me up short, and got me thinking about how little anybody really knows about Gleevec. We know that it makes GIST tumors shrink, but the long-term survival studies haven’t been finished yet. We know that it is possible for the cancer to mutate to get around Gleevec, but nobody knows how often that happens or what causes it. So maybe we’ve seen the last of this cancer, but it’s still possible that we’ve just been given a window of time before it all starts up again.

As a compromise between optimism and pessimism, Deb and I have decided that we should spend the next year or two not worrying too much about the long term. (As a friend overheard one old woman say, “I don’t even buy green bananas any more.”) Our slang for this particular policy decision is that we’re on the No Regrets Tour. If you catch us doing something a little more extravagant than usual, it’s part of the Tour. Next week we go touring in a more literal sense: we’re driving up to Vermont to pick up our 12-year-old friend Meg and then flying with her to Chicago for five days. For the last several years Meg has visited us for a week each summer. We always thought it would be fun to travel with her sometime, so, well, why wait?

I am recommending this attitude to everyone. If there’s something you’ve been wanting to do with Deb, well, she’s alert, she’s healthy – why wait? Join the Tour.

Tonight, a few hours after coming back from Dr. Lamb, we went to our local Vietnamese restaurant. Deb’s fortune cookie said: “Your path is arduous, but will be amply rewarding.” She saved it.