New year, new start, same chemo

Happy New Year! This year, my sister, Joe, and I decided to spend New Year's Eve having dinner with Sharon and Ramin. It was a very low key evening with delicious food, and great company. They keep telling me that I'll feel the best right before beginning my next round of chemotherapy, so why not go out for a nice evening? I had until the morning of January 2, so I might as well enjoy our last meal of 2012.

2013, here we come!

The next day, on New Year's, we had another low key family day at my parent's house where we dressed in traditional Korean clothes (hanbok), and ate rice cake and dumpling soup.

Gangnam style!

Of course, even as the hours ticked down on 2012 and started up on 2013, January 2 came closer and closer. So, this morning I started my second cycle of chemo. The red syringe of death was back, this time in two vials rather than one, which surprised me a bit. (They had half the dosage in each, though). It was as painful as ever. I was, of course, the youngest person there. (At least I can say I was the youngest one somewhere. I am usually one of the oldest all the time.) Joe, who is perpetually busy at work, but had made arrangements so he could attend the first day of chemo at each cycle. The first day has the biggest dose of chemo, and the red syringe of death is hard to take without him there. I am glad Joe made time for this. I had initially told him not to worry about coming to chemo, as I know how busy he is and how much his patients mean to him. But truth be told, I was secretly so relieved when he told me that everyone was being supportive, and he was able to come for the first day of chemo for all my cycles. As a family friend who had gone through chemo himself noted, there's something about that pain that you can never forget. It's like acid traveling up your veins. I am lucky that Joe is able to come. And my sister was there, as always.

Ouch. Really. Ouch.

There is something very disheartening about starting the new year with chemo. It' s not the best way to begin a brand new 2013. But I have to remind myself that while I start the year with a bald head and a heavy heart, I will end the year healthy. I'll probably still be bald or close to bald, but it is not a bad ending.

I've come to realize that health is something that we can never take for granted, either for ourselves or for others. My father-in-law was at a car dealership recently, after dealing with a bout of gastroenteritis (also known as the stomach flu). It's a pretty nasty condition, but he felt well enough to go with Mom to get her a new car. But just as they were sitting down at a desk to go through the necessary paperwork, he felt dizzy...and then fainted. He returned to consciousness with the sight of several car salesmen as well as a very worried wife staring down at him. He looked up and dryly noted, "It must have been the sticker shock." Everyone, of course, just started roaring with laughter. It turned out that he was fine, he was just a bit dehydrated from his bout with gastroenteritis. But it did remind us all, very soberly, that we should never take our health for granted.

We are now trying to decide if we are going to go through with a stem cell (also know as bone marrow) transplant. I am still going to need a total of 4-6 cycles of chemo, but they want to start evaluating for stem cell transplant early on. It has been strongly urged and recommended by my oncologist; however, it is a lengthy and dangerous procedure and I'm not too keen on undertaking such a painful task with such high risk. It entails a massive dose of chemo to kill all the cells in my bone marrow -- both healthy and not -- and then inject new, healthy stem cells to replace the dead ones. It requires hospitalization for about a month, and I am probably going to be under quarantine because I will be extremely susceptible to infections. I cannot imagine not being able to hold my baby, or kiss my husband. Despite our many discussions, I am still not quite sure what to expect if and when I decide to do it, and we must meet with the transplant surgeons to see if what my particular case would entail. Ultimately, we must exercise due diligence and see what all our options are.

The problem with my type of cancer is that it is recurrent by nature. Even when the alternative comes with the prospect of month-long hospitalization and isolation, I do not want to go through chemo ever again. So if stem cell transplant is the answer to no more chemo, then I will seriously consider it. And quite frankly, Joe reminded me that some of my chemo medications have a lifetime limit on them. This means that I can only get a certain amount of that medication in my lifetime, and cannot exceed that amount because of its toxicity.

We are planning on flying out to Stanford for a consultation with the head of their Multidisciplinary Cutaneous Lymphoma Group. We're pretty lucky to have that kind of a consult as an option given the rarity of my cancer. The doctor we're meeting with headed a study for a new type of chemo drug for my type of lymphoma. Speaking with them may help us understand what all our options are, and whether the stem cell transplant is really the right choice. To paraphrase my very wise father-in-law, we will see what the transplant people say, and it just may be too much "sticker shock" to actually go through with it. But, on the other hand, we must pay the price for what we want. He ended up buying the car that day, despite his "sticker shock," because it was something they needed to get done and that was their opportunity to do it. I want to be healthy. I want to be well. And I want to stay well. So I may just have to buy the car to do it.

Every year comes with a fresh start, but for better or worse, we're still carrying our baggage from the year before. Here's to ringing in the new year with chemo, and hopefully leaving it with a fresh new sprout of hair on this head. Happy 2013, everyone!

Yes, this is a wig!