Happy Father's Day!

Happy Father's Day to all of you Dad's out there! I am looking forward to my first Father's Day tomorrow. I suppose it is a bit ironic that my cancer came coupled with one of the greatest things that has ever happened in my life, fatherhood. I don't know where I would be right now without my little buddy! It is great to be a Dad!

I was able to go ahead with another treatment of chemo on Thursday. My counts had dropped tremendously from Monday though. My WBC were down to 2.7 and my neutrophils were back down to 1.2. It is amazing how quickly they fluctuate. The plan now is to count this past Thursday as Day 1 of Round 2, and I am back on the Neupogen shots to get my counts back up so that I don't have to miss a week. Hopefully with the shots I can get in a full 3 weeks this round. I still am feeling great, and that is helping me to keep going. Normally they will not do chemo when neutrophils drop below 1.5, but this is the second time they have allowed me to push ahead because I am feeling and looking so well. They also backed off of the decadron, so I was able to get some sleep on Thursday night. This time I fell asleep at 10 pm, but woke up at 3 am and was up for the rest of the night. I guess half a night of sleep is better than no sleep.

They did check my HCG on Thursday as well, and it is up to 848. You may recall that the last HCG level was about 250 three weeks ago. It is difficult to say what this means at this time because I only had 2 days of chemo in the first round. I am encouraged by this number because it may at least show that the HCG is not rising as fast. When I had it checked weekly for 3 consecutive weeks prior to this chemo, it was more than doubling each week. If that had continued the HCG would now be over 2000. So in that regard 848 looks pretty good. I will have an appointment with the doctor on Thursday before my next dose of chemo and will see what he thinks then. I don't expect that anything will change; this is still pretty early and we will hopefully see a drop in the HCG after 3 more weeks of chemo.

The next few weeks will be a game of alternating between chemo and Neupogen; pumping up my blood counts only to knock them back down. This should also continue to knock down the cancer as they pump more chemo into me. This will keep me home most of the time since my blood counts are so erratic. I truly feel stronger and stronger everyday though, and I feel like this cancer is just barely hanging on. If I could only find it's fingers I would pry them loose and kick it out the door. Maybe a few more weeks of Taxol and Gemzar will do just that!