I'm no doctor, but...

I'm no doctor, but my speculation about this round would appear to be correct. I'm still in the throes of the "very bad days" and, to me, they seem much more like how I felt during the first round than the second one. I can barely put into words how horrible I feel right now, and it's been this way since at least Thursday.

The big difference, as far as I'm concerned, was jumping right back into chemo after three weeks instead of waiting at least one more. (My body had five weeks to bring itself back to some sense of normal before my second round. See previous post.) I've decided that's going to change, going forward. I'm calling this particular shot, so to speak.

We've got two weeks of radiation treatments tentatively scheduled for my hip pain, and the doctors agree that they don't want that to happen while I'm at my chemo worst. If we can start those during what would be my third week of this round, the two week course of radiation would push my next infusion out to a fourth week. That should help. 

We tried to firm the radiation plans up this week but, with the 4th of July falling on Thursday and no one working at the Cancer Center on Friday, we won't know if we can work this out until we make some calls on Monday. Ideally, we'd like to start the radiation treatments around July 15, pushing the next chemo infusion from July 23 to July 30. If that doesn't work, I'm certainly not opposed to pushing it out yet another week. 

Regardless, I'm no longer going to do any chemo more frequently than once a month. When we had to postpone for a couple weeks before my second round, my oncologist kept saying that a week here or there wasn't going to make that big a difference. I plan to remind him of that. I need that extra week to help me survive the week from hell that hits me shortly after infusion.