{"id":9607,"date":"2010-02-12T22:58:31","date_gmt":"2010-02-13T05:58:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=9607"},"modified":"2010-02-12T22:58:31","modified_gmt":"2010-02-13T05:58:31","slug":"cancer-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=9607","title":{"rendered":"Cancer Update!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>So when last we chatted about my balls<\/a>, I had just had surgery, which had gone pretty well, and my pre-op CT scan had come back normal. All indications were that the cancer hadn’t spread, and I was awaiting the pathology report and the post-op blood work to determine what my treatment regimen would be. I was hoping to end up on surveillance<\/a>, which basically is just what it sounds like — they watch you carefully, you do tests every month, get a CT scan every couple months, and if the cancer doesn’t show back up, you win.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen. Instead, starting in about a week, I’m going to get two rounds of chemotherapy.<\/p>\n

That’s mainly due to what they found in the pathology report. The good news is that my blood work went back to normal after the surgery, so if anything’s metastasized, it hasn’t gone very far. But the tumor itself was pretty far advanced, and it had at least one, and possibly two kinds of tissue that spread easily.<\/p>\n

The first kind — the kind I certainly had — was enbryonal carcinoma<\/a>. If that sounds like “embryo” to you, you win 80 Fecke Points. Yes, my cancer was mostly made up of placental tissue with some yolk sac<\/a> and random tissue<\/a> thrown in. Indeed, according to my blood markers, I had the level of alpha-fetoprotein<\/a> of a woman in her second month of pregnancy.<\/p>\n

The jokes pretty much write themselves; I choose to believe that I’ve had the mythical Gay Abortion. Okay, I’m straight, but the cells that made my wacky, potentially-life-threatening fetusoid were all male.<\/p>\n

Anyhow, EC is pretty nasty and tends to hang around and cause trouble for some time, so that alone would be call for chemotherapy. I also might have had some choriocarcinoma<\/a>, which spreads differently than testicular cancer usually does (by blood rather than lymph nodes); while the pathologist couldn’t say for sure that I did, he evidently couldn’t say for sure that I didn’t. And again, that argues for chemo.<\/p>\n

So chemo it is. I’m not looking forward to getting poisoned for a week, and then doing it again three weeks later, but if that’s what I have to do to live cancer-free, I’m willing to put up with it. The good news — there’s always good news with testicular cancer — is that the regimen of bleomycin, etoposide, and cisplatin (BEP)<\/a> is really, really effective in killing this stuff off. I have a better than 95% chance of needing no further treatment after this — and a nearly 100% chance of long-term survival which, I keep telling myself, is all any of us has.<\/p>\n

So it’s not the best possible news, but it’s not the worst possible news, either. And hopefully, in about eight weeks, I can close the book on the treatment phase of this, and start celebrating milestones. Believe me, I’m really looking forward to it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So when last we chatted about my balls, I had just had surgery, which had gone pretty well, and my pre-op CT scan had come back normal. All indications were that the cancer hadn’t spread, and I was awaiting the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-the-bloggers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9607\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}