Follow Up Between Infusions

 

Yesterday, June 9^th, I had a meeting with an NP who works on the lymphoma team that’s treating me. First up was a blood draw and then the meeting. We looked at the blood test results and they were all quite good. After just one infusion, everything is moving in the right direction. That means that the drugs are working. Great news! It’s now thirteen days after that infusion and I feel a lot better. My appetite has returned and I’m eating a lot. Of course many of the long term side effects from the R-CHOP infusion are still with me, and same for the daily maintenance drugs. Chasing them is tricky because there is a not yet a pattern to predict what’s coming next. That should improve after the next infusion, and certainly the third infusion.

In my last post I mentioned the uncontrollable shaking caused by the immunotherapy drug, Rituxin. The NP said that this is a fairly common response for the first dose and it may not happen again, or at least not as severely. I’ll also pre-medicate before the next dose. I don’t understand the science behind this yet so I’ll have to take her word for it. This next dose is also expected to go slowly, but at least leave enough time for the other drugs on the same day. If there are no problems they’ll speed up administration of the Rituxin on the remaining infusions.

So it’s weird. You can feel a little better because you’ve already knocked back some of the symptoms of the disease before the therapy started (and I have/had a lot of symptoms). You feel this mostly at the end of the infusion cycle, after the worst impact of the drugs (when you’re on the couch and feeling totally awful). But you know that all of the remaining infusions will grind you down. It will be a challenging summer. The final infusion is scheduled for September 15^th, then the long period of recovery begins.