One...day...left...

Today, my penultimate day of therapy, is over. In less than 24 hours I will be done tearing down my body and focused wholly on healing and rebuilding it. Of course, it will be a long, slow process but at least, from what I can tell, I am either at the bottom or a few days removed from it.

The reason I can say this is because my last chemotherapy treatment was last Tuesday! How is this possible? Well, originally, my medical oncologist said that I would get three treatments of Cisplatin lasting a course of nine weeks--one dose per three weeks. After my first round of Cisplatin, my body reacted violently, in combination with the radiation, and I broke out with a lot of very painful mouth sores. When the medical oncologist examined my mouth, he didn't like what he saw and decided to go with another, similar drug that supposedly doesn't have as brutal of side effects as Cisplatin. I did three rounds of the new chemo, called Carboplatin. The doses were smaller and received on a weekly basis so that three weeks of Carboplatin would have been the same as one dose of Cisplatin.

Fastforward to this morning, after having three doses of Carboplatin, my mouth sores again came back just as bad as the first time. To make a long story short, the doctor again decided that my body had had enough and decided this morning to forego the final dose and discontinue the chemotherapy.

Of course, the first question that comes to mind is, "Won't this lessen the effectiveness of the attack on the cancer?" Well, the quick answer is yes, but when you consider that the chemotherapy was added to my treatment plan as almost an afterthought, then it isn't nearly as alarming. The other thing to consider is that it was originally meant to boost the effectiveness of the radiation, and since I only have one day of radiation left it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to continue the treatment. In the end, I'd just be putting my body, perhaps unnecessarily, through a whole lot more pain (I already am unable to eat and can barely drink anything, including water) for minimal benefit. And since the doctor thought it was a good idea to discontinue, I figured that I'd probably be okay.

So, tomorrow is it. After I hop off that table one last time following radiation I won't be going back (knock on wood). I'm hoping that this is just the beginning of many more good reports to come.