The Return of Wine, and Other Silver Linings

Let's start with some good news. For the last few days I've been able to reintroduce wine to my daily diet, with no intense headaches. It's not that I've found some herbal preventive or some magical cure for a pounding frontal lobe. No, the reason is far simpler than that. I've stopped using Stivarga. It wasn't working.  I've talked with Dr. Z about what to do next, and we've decided to explore some clinical trials of some novel immune-system therapies.  We still have in our back pocket, as Dr. Z likes to say, a combination of chemotherapies I like to call the nuclear option. It's basically everything I've done before, delivered all at once every 14 days. Sounds like fun, right?

The clinical trials are for a class of drugs called anti-PD-1. I asked Dr. Z what "PD" meant and he claimed he couldn't recall. Naturally, I Googled it and learned that it stands for "Programmed Death." I'm not kidding. At least it's anti-Programmed Death, because a pro-Programmed Death drug probably wouldn't sell very well. I think the term refers to cell death, but I can't be certain.

More good news is that the trials will likely allow me to get to know some fine East Coast city far better  than I already do. That's because there are no relevant trials going on at Emory, so the best options are MSKCC in New York, Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and maybe Vanderbilt in Nashville. There will likely be frequent visits, and possibly some extended stays. I'll know more over the next couple of weeks. 

But wait, there's even more good news! I don't have a hip injury, arthritis, or some other joint disease. No, the source of my increasing discomfort is... the cancer that we wiped out in my pelvis over two years ago. It's no longer active, but it left its swiss cheese-like mark on the left sacro-iliac region, per Dr. Hall, my new orthopedist. He thinks I can get some relief from physical therapy, but not just any PT will do. "Look, I own the PT clinic down the hall, and I can make money off you by sending you there," he told me today. "But I'm not. I'm sending you to another guy who does some weird stuff, like Mr Miyagi." 

The best part isn't that I may get to meet Pat Morita's double.  It's that this PT guy has a couple clients even more famous than me. In fact, they were mentioned in one of my recent posts. Want a hint?

That's right, the same hands that keep limber the extremities of the world's greatest metal band for those wicked guitar and drum solos will soon be helping me get back to my old self (fully capable of sitting in the car free of agony, able to jog short distances at an old man pace, etc.).

See, this post was full of good news, wasn't it?