Happy -- Or, You Know, Perhaps Maybe Not -- Pills

It's official: no more chemo infusions. As of today, I'm on a pill form of chemo (with an infusion of Avastin for good measure). The plan is to get an infusion of Avastin then for the next fourteen days take three Xeloda pills in the morning and three in the evening, plus whatever anti-nausea medications may be required to offset the impact of the pills, then take a week off, and then start again. 

Around and around we go.


And for all this it appears I can expect... an extra three months of life. 

The oncologist today had to look up the paper that described the protocol I'm now on so he could calculate my dosages. While he was looking for dosing information, I was scrambling to read as much of the article summaries as I could understand. And if I read them correctly, the difference between people who stopped chemo and did nothing versus those that stopped chemo and started my new treatment protocol is that the people in the latter group lasted three additional months before their tumors started growing again.

Three months is good right? Maybe. It sort of depends on how bad the reaction to the pills is, I think. Three additional months of feeling good would be worth it; three months of feeling crappy, perhaps not so much.

In some ways, though, the real question is, "Plus three months compared to what?" What's the baseline survival post chemo? That's the into I was desperately searching for in the papers and the screens were clicking by, and it's the info I never really found. But the numbers flashing by reminded by of one of the points emphasized in Being Mortal: patients think in years, doctors in months. 

I was really starting to think I had a shot at seeing Star Wars: The Cash Cow Needs Milking, but after today that seems a long way off.