The last week has been a challenging one for Susan after her big chemo on the 25th. For example, last Saturday I found her lying on the sofa with tears streaming down her cheeks. "What's the matter?" I asked. "It hurts," she replied. "How bad?" I said. "Seven on a scale of ten." Ouch! After much discussion she reluctantly took a vicodin, and slowly the pain released its grip on her abdomen. This was the first vicodin she's taken since leaving the hospital almost a month ago. She's concerned about its side effects that brought her there originally.
Even when the pain leaves, the nausea continues to plague her and makes her feel "icky" most of the time. Yesterday, during her short treatment with topotecan, we came across a new anti-nausea medication that goes by the brand name of anzamet. From its associated web site we learned that of all the chemo drugs, cisplatin is at the top of the list (5 categories) in causing nausea. No wonder she's had such a problem during this round of chemo. By contrast, taxol--which she took last round--is only on level two.
Susan took the anzamet after we returned home, and by late yesterday afternoon was feeling good again. This makes the second good day she's had this week (Monday was the first, for some unknown reason). We are hoping that this turns out to be the silver bullet for combating her nausea. The other drug that seems to work is compazine, but this causes "restless leg syndrome" (see for example, www.rls.org). In RLS the sufferer [it's estimated that there are 16 million of these in the US alone] experiences jerking leg movements while trying to fall asleep at night. This tends to make getting a good night's sleep a challenge for both the RLS afflicted person and her/his bedmate. This is yet another example of how drug interactions daisy chain together to sometimes make the treatment worse than the disease. [See the article below on "Stability".]
On the good news front, we were informed during yesterday's chemo visit that Susan's tumor marker had fallen from 26 to 20. We try not to get too excited about low numbers like this, given their somewhat misleading character as observed prior to her last surgery. However, it does seem consistent with the checkup she had on Tuesday with Dr. Munoz. His observation: "your abdomen is smooth and soft with no indication of any recurrent disease. This is a real contrast to how it felt right before surgery." His other comment was a little less encouraging: "After what I did to you, you'll always feel 'different' in your abdomen."
Posted by John Dishman at May 3, 2002 10:55 AM