My Octopus Teacher

Just kidding. It’s really an image of my triple negative cancer—something I found on the trodelvy website. Ugly but cancer has taught me a great deal, My new drug is Trodelvy “an immune targeted therapy medicine. It is made up of: sacituzumab, a type of molecule called a monoclonal antibody, that targets the Trop-2 protein; the Trop-2 protein is found in more than 90% of triple-negative breast cancers.”

I feel very fortunate to be able to get it. It was approved in late April 2020 and skipped last leg of trial bc it was so effective. It has not been approved in the UK, other parts of Europe, Asia and Australia. One metastatic friend in India is lamenting her lack of access. Her husband mentioned that the drug is very costly—i’ve heard estimates from 35,000 to 90,000 an infusion and I get 3 a month. Thank God for medicare—wish everyone could get. I’ve mentioned before that I haven’t suffered with neutropenia (low white cell count which can be deadly) bc of my own genetic makeup. If you have two homozygous allels with a certain protein this drug can almost kill you. Apparently I don’t have them. My latest scan shows that in 3 mo. the drug has shrunk my liver lesion—cat scan says mild decrease but Dan calculated it has decreased the volume of the tumor by half.

But it’s a tough drug. People see me and say it’s good you’re doing so well. Am I? yeah well except for the 2 broken ribs that they gave me morphine for (and I haven’t used) and the other 4 fractured ribs I’m babying. Old radiation treatments caused these ribs to fracture and break. The doc who read scan in January didn’t even notice the 6 fractured ribs! you’ve got to double check everything. They were there but doc missed. I know bc Dan and I looked at Jan. disk! Helps to have a doc in the house.

When ribs break, they hurt horribly but pain goes away the next day. Last Monday I was in excrutiating pain (8 out of 10 even with hydrocodon). But by infusion the next day I was much better. It’s tolerable but feels like my body collapsing in on itself, and I was hoping to do exercises to stretch out back and chest but I’m fearful of breaking another rib so i stand hunched over.

Oh and drug has given me eye floaters, nausea and the big D frequently. Fortunately I have drugs to help but it all gets old. And when I asked nurse practitioner if/when i could go off chemo & she said that doc foresees me being on it til end of my life. Oh joy.

Nevertheless over the past 4 yrs I feel as if I’ve gotten an associates degree in oncology, :). My cancer teacher. Plus the good news is that the lung fluid is gone and drug doesn’t cause.

I’ve been slack about writing bc of treatment of course and I’ve had OT and PT ppl come to my house to give me tips for dressing, helping my neuropathy and increasing muscle strength. Great ppl but the trick will be for me to actually do the PT exercises. PT guy told me to work on posture & I tried to explain how surgeon pulled my back skin/muscle to my front & I had bad radiation burns that had caused the skin on my left side to harden. But he seemed unimpressed by my excuse for bad posture. I’m sure he’s heard it all.

The other thing that has slowed my writing was planning for and renting house at Emerald Isle North Carolina the first week in May for all 12 of us (kids spouses, grands). I don’t know if we’ll ever be together like that again. The week was magical with lots of good seafood—we all shared cooking or went out—although there were slight problems w/ sharing baths and so on even with 5 bedrooms and 3 baths. I’ll post a few photos below. My hubs has always been God of the sandcastle villages. My daughter Elizabeth Wiseman (follow her on instagram @ewisemanphoto) took the black and white photo. One night we also watched My Octopus Teacher which reminded me of Hobbe’s observation that life is nasty, short and brutish—even within a society. But the underwater scenes were spectacular and I was amazed the filmmaker could snorkel with no oxygen tanks for long periods. And it was sweet that he developed relationship with a young female Octopus. Boy was she ever a dedicated mother! Birth, love, pregnancy, dementia, and death.

But for me, all in all it was the best mother’s day week ever!

This post has gotten too long already and I will close with a mother’s day message from a friend even tho it’s past mother’s day—esp. since I began by discussing the intricacies of DNA:

“The prayer of a mother is more powerful than all other prayers. A mother is forever connected to the biology of her children. This metaphysical revelation has been known to all the great masters throughout time, and it's now confirmed with biochemistry. The heart and brain of every one of your tens of trillions of physical cells is known as the mitochondria, and this portion of each cell contains only the DNA of your Mother. This DNA -- the actual ‘light-code' at the center of life -- is the heart of your construction. Your mother touches you from inside every cell. Prayers, in the midst of this microscopic world, are the means of communicating -- heart to heart -- light to light -- core to core.

Your heart, like the brain, generates a powerful electromagnetic field. Measured as an electrocardiogram -- the heart's field is sixty times larger than the brain's, recorded in an electroencephalogram. Physically detected at great distance, your heart is a light signal, like a radio wave travelling out through space. The power of a mother's prayer comes from the mitochondria of every one of her cells -- a projection of the heart . . . DNA to DNA. This affects the light that surrounds her children . . . alters the light that constructs their physical bodies . . . literally alters the body's sensations of space within time. This planet is called ‘Mother Earth' because every single physical body is made from her nutrients. Your body originates from the nutrients of your mother's womb. The word ‘womb' means ‘the future' -- the word ‘woman' comes from ‘womb-man' . . . means the future within now. As you pass through life, you pass through these prayers for your future, created in your birth womb . . . the heart of the heart of your mother.

From the Guru Singh newsletter.