Chocolate Chip Cookies and Zika

I met with brave Dr. Valliant yesterday to finalize plans for treatment.  When we met before, he had said they were doing genetic testing of the tumor to see if it had DNA or proteins that could be more amenable to chemo.  When his office called telling me about the chemo drugs (that are free!), my assumption was that this could be good news.  In the context of treating a brain tumor good news.  It turns out, it is exactly opposite that.  The other possible outcome of the genetic testing was finding out what the tumor did not have.  It turns out that there is a specific mutation that causes things to grow slowly.  My tumor lacks that particular mutation.

He then gave me the analogy of the biopsy as related to drilling into a chocolate chip cookie.  You might drill into the chocolate and think the entire cookie is chocolate.  While I am thinking that an entire cookie made of chocolate is a good thing, the analogy turned on me.  Somehow this means that my low grade tumor has moved from a low two to closer to a high two, approaching three.  I still don’t know how the thought of a warm, gooey chocolate chip cookie turned from good to bad so quickly.  Dr. V tried to explain the biology of it, and I appreciate his assumption of my basic knowledge of biology.  The problem is that I hated biology.  Mr. Lytle, my high school biology teacher with the long bushy sideburns never ignited my science passion the way that Mr. Mayhew, the Chemistry teacher did.  So, I am going to just have to take his word for it that the full chocolate cookie is a bad thing.

So, the recommendation to add chemo was not an extra, targeted punch to a vulnerable foe.  It is a more aggressive treatment for a more aggressive tumor.  So that sucks.

I start everything next Wednesday, and now have such a long list of prescriptions that I need to prepare a list and timeline.  With adding chemo, fatigue is much more likely, and there are a plethora of possible / probable side effects.  So that sucks.

My window of how long to expect “normalcy” after treatment shrank from 5-7 years to 2-5 years. We just spent a boatload of money to upgrade our windows at home, so I know the importance of a good window.  So that sucks.

When discussing what happens at the end of the normalcy window, Dr. V was still vague, and while reiterating we could do some of the same things, did add more about things that are in process and experimental, like virus therapy. Like Zika.  Dr. V is now telling us about things that may eventually be a useful therapy, like somehow injecting Zika into it.  So that sucks.

No pithy wrap-up here.