trial by clinical trial

🧪 well after that overly-detailed waiting for scan results post, i at least owe the 2 or 3 of you readers here (thank you!) some actual results. 

they were mixed. the scan showed some growth on the spots of cancer I already have, but no new growth. so i thought it would be back to chemo and hair loss and fatigue, but my doc had another idea: a clinical trial. apparently there's one being recruited for now, in boston, that i might qualify for, and that could be of some benefit ("could be" is the operative phrase there, obviously, but one hopes). 

the easiest way to describe it is to say it's a trial that is testing a combination of 2 immunotherapy agents on tumor-based cancers. you may have heard about a decade ago (if you were at all reading about cancer then haha, which i was not!) that immunotherapy was discovered to be super-effective, miraculous even, on some cancers (mostly blood-based). ovarian was not one of them. 

these days researchers are combining 2 kinds of immunotherapy, with some better results on tumor-based cancers. so i'd be participating in one of these. generally OC patients are not recruited for the double-immuno trials because it's responded so poorly in single-agent ones, but apparently this combo (with intriguingly mysterious letter number combinations like AGEN1181 and AGEN2034!) has shown something different in tumor-based cancers, like kidney cancer, so there is optimism that it could help OC. 

so, doing a clinical trial: on the one hand, bring it on, right? i mean, i've not been having a ton of luck with traditional, standard-of-care treatments of late. and each time i get one, they become even less effective. let's go at this with something out-of-the-box. on the other hand, well, there's not really another hand here. i did not have "medical guinea pig" on my bucket list, but neither did i have "advanced cancer-haver," so... not a whole lot to lose here, right?

i'm reviewing all the trial info now, and next week i'll go into boston to chat with the people running the trial, so i can ask questions about logistics and side effects and all that other fun stuff. oh and sign the consent form. 😬meanwhile, i am to take a month-long vacation from all drugs, in order to be cleared to begin the trial ones. 

i left my doctor's office yesterday with a weird feeling. i was obviously bummed about the continued cancer growth, pleased there was no new growth, and relieved i wouldn't be spending my 3rd summer in a row losing my hair and being crazy-exhausted. i hadn't even considered there could be another option in this scenario. so i felt dare i say hopeful, and i let myself feel that for a while. 

it was softer and lighter and nicer and such a reprieve from the intensity of walking around with imminent death in the back of my mind. i am cautious around hope, and yet, i know that i need it. 

to that effect, and to celebrate the fact that i will not lose my hair this summer, i've decided i will get a proper haircut and perhaps a bold color (BLUE?) to lift the mood. and maybe to feel like more of a badass since i haven't really been wearing my doc martens a lot during lockdown. or since cancer, to be honest. i look at them now and they feel like they are of another era entirely. so maybe i need to enter a new one. 

🧪