You may have seen some of the Facebook posts I’ve put up over the last month or so having to do with Larry. We’re going through what we’ll have to call our “cancer period.” Yeah, Larry has cancer. More accurately, he has colorectal cancer which spread from his colon to his liver. Fortunately, it has not spread beyond the liver. Spreading to the liver is the typical place that colon cancer travels to if it does spread, so right now we’re dealing with “run of the mill” colon cancer that’s spread. We obviously are relieved it hasn’t spread further. There’s lots of emotion right now about the whole situation – some of it is fear, some of it is anger, and a lot of it is hope. Lots of the latter, honestly, but there are days when the other emotions can threaten to overwhelm hope. I don’t like those days.
Larry’s going to get his chemotherapy port installed on Tuesday. A port allows a much more efficient way to administer chemo and take blood without having to destroy a person’s veins. Also, chemo can’t go directly into veins as it’s toxic. He’ll then start chemotherapy shortly thereafter. We have gone to get second opinions at another specialist doctor at UCLA and then another at City of Hope. We think the therapy will be folfox avastin but City of Hope’s proposal was to do something called folfoxiri avastin. Basically, it seems that folfox avastin is a ‘doublet’ treatment while folfoxiri avastin is a ‘triplet’ treatment. You’re getting more drugs injected into you in the triplet and it’s much more aggressive at fighting the lingering cancer in the liver, but of course the toll is greater. The City of Hope doctor believes Larry’s age will be an asset here and he’d be able to respond well to it. So we’re currently in that stage of running that information by our current oncologist at UCLA/Burbank to see if he agrees.
All of these things are a lot to deal with. Some days are better than others, emotionally. Send out good vibes into the world for Larry, for everyone. This diagnosis is so fucking messed up – he’s 43 and diagnosed with colon cancer. You’re not even advised to get a colonoscopy on a regular basis until 50, although we’ve been learning that guidelines were recently changed advising it at 45, and thoughts are that it may even go lower because there are more and more incidents of early colon cancer being observed.
I’ll try to keep updates coming either here or on Facebook – the good vibes do help, as do the stories of people beating this.