Laura A. Katz MD, a board-certified obgyn talks about life, women's health, motherhood and the "sensitive subjects."
It’s that time again.
Time to draw my sword and open my vein
Disrupting Cancer’s evil reign.
Time for the battlements to flow
Freely to let lymphoma know
There is no place left to go.
No place left to hide so get ready.
My force to defeat you flows strong and steady.
Seeking you out in all your hiding places
Prepared to leave no tangible traces.
Our farewell will be long but not fond
For ours IS a breakable bond.
Dr. Katz, age 51
The day has finally arrived, after multiple snafus, fits, and stops: the first chemo treatment! Hurray?! Is that the right response? I’m just not sure. All I know is that we showed up, I have my Star Wars shirt on, my port is accessed and drugs are flowing. Look out Hodgkins! It is on!. I am literally getting chemo right now. I can feel my eye fluttering like I am getting a migraine. I can feel my heart fluttering but I think that is just nerves. Of course, my long gone reflux resurfaced almost immediately. Weirdly, my hump on my neck started hurting almost right away. Maybe that means the drugs are already doing battle with my nodes!. Yess!…but owww at the same time!..lol
So let’s talk about chemotherapy for a minute. What the hell is it? Chemotherapy or chemo is a type of cancer treatment that involves giving multi anti cancer medications through an iv or port with the idea to try to cure the patient of cancer. It can also be given to prolong a patient’s life. It can also be given to reduce symptoms. (Palliative therapy).
There are three main kinds of chemo therapy: straight chemotherapy, hormone therapy, and targeted therapy. Now straight chemo is kind of old school. It aims at DNA damage or inhibiting replication by sending intracellular poisons right into the cancer cells..and unfortunately any other rapidly dividing cells like your stomach and hair.
Hormonal therapies, on the other hand are medicine with specific genetic and molecular targets that focuses on inhibiting growth of endocrine hormones like estrogen for breast cancer and andeogens foe prostate cancer.
Targeted therapy targets a different kind of growth inhibition. Targeted therapy is drugs that inhibit growth signals by inhibiting receptor tyrosine kinase at the cell surface.
Any of these three types of therapy are truly systemic therapy for cancer. This means that they are injected into the venous system and can therefore reach cancer anywhere in the body.
Because chemo is usually considered cytotoxic, it naturally affects dividing cells. The assumption is that the cancer cells will be dividing rapidly. While this is true, other cells in your body are also dividing rapidly in your bone marrow, your hair, your digestive tract. So, that explains the nausea, vomitting, hair loss, and low white blood cells and platelets. Side effects people! Yuck! But, I gotta tell ya, I will take them if it means getting rid of the cancer. Have a great day everybody!
Dr. Katz
The big day is finally here. Pet scan day! What is a Pet scan you ask? A pet scan is a nuclear metabolic scan. Typical protocol goes something like this. You check in
They check your blood sugar to make sure it is below 200. Then they have you wait an hour to let the glucose spread through your body to your now starving cells. (You had to fast for this). Then yiu go through a machine that scans you from your head to your knees kind of like a CT scan, but more claustrophobic. The scan itself takes about 20 minutes. It looks for what’s called hot spots. These hit spots are areas of increased uptake of that glucose and increased metabolic activity. Since we know that cancer cells are rocking it out with devious metabolic workup more than your normal cells, those hot spots are likely to be areas of cancer. These results let you know at a cellular level where you are really starting from before you start chemo . It is usually a prerequisite to have a Pet scan before being able to participate in any clinical trials as well. Even though I have been waiting for this scan for what seems like forever, now that the day is here the reality of it is kind of hitting me like a ton of bricks. It didn’t help that I barely slept last night and woke up feeling 80 years old either. I am usually not the guest of honor at a pity party but oh man I almost threw one this morning….lol. Oh well. Time to put my party hat away. Time to dive in. I’ll let ya know how it turns out.
Dr. Katz