C-H-E-M-O and Chemo was his name-o!

So yesterday's 9 month check up was pretty much the equivalent of George W. Bush's tenure as president: Too long, lots of bad news, lots of head shaking (left to right, not up and down), a constant feeling of "this sucks" was felt, and we couldn't wait for it to be over. It turns out the tumors (lymphnodes) in my abdomen decided to start growing some more. There are actually a lot of tumors in my abdomen and while science can completely refute this, I feel as though they are the main cause of my gut and weight gain. It has nothing to do with poor eating and lack of exercise, it's all about the tumors. Anyway, my doctor decided that now would be a good time for me to start chemotherapy. If there is any good news to come out of this, the whole idea behind monitoring my cancer's progression was to catch it in that moment before it gets out of control and treat it at that time. It looks like we've done that and my doctor feels pretty good about my chances for remission. With that said, there's no way for him to know whether the remission will last for 8 months or 8 years. The median duration of remission for someone like me is 5 years, but there are cases on both sides of the spectrum in which people have lasted less than 5 years and much more than 5 years. I offered up an idea for a clinical trial in which they test the duration of remission in a patient receiving this chemo (me) while this person lives in Blacksburg, VA for free during football season, gets a luxury box at the games, and gets to be a guest coach for one call a game and choose the next play. The secondary endpoint of the study would be to see how many consecutive days I would enjoy a 1 hour full body massage while on chemo. I feel as though this would be a pivotal study in the social and emotional aspects of cancer treatment. Unfortunately it fell on deaf ears. I have a PET Scan coming up and that will help determine the exact treatment I'll get but it's most likely going to be something called R-CHOP. And guess what, one of the side effects is weight gain. Not weight loss like most chemo patients, but weight freaking gain. I plan on extending an olive branch to my cancer and let it know that if it's plan this entire time was to make me fatter, we can call it even right now and I'll gladly do it myself if it decides to leave. As of the time of this posting my people have not heard back from it's people. If R-CHOP is chosen, it will last 18 weeks and I'll receive treatment every 3 weeks, with the first treatment either on 6/19 or 6/20. In an ironic twist of fate, I'll be the first of my many balding friends to actually go bald after easily having the best hairline and most hair out of them for the last 28 years. I'm sure I'll have many many more postings after chemo starts and am going to attempt an hour by hour live update of my 1st or 2nd treatment. Well, I'm sorry this post wasn't as joyful as the previous ones, but this was bound to happen eventually. I'll write more when I get more info about what's going on. Thanks!!!