On Cancer.

My father is undergoing his third bout of chemo/radiation since 2002. I think this is the third time around. Maybe 4th. He’s had multiple myeloma, which is pretty bad as far as things go. He had an auto-immune transplant in 2003 at Duke. He’s got 5 more days of radiation this week, but the various drugs they have him on are kicking his ass. He’s doing some pill form of chemo called Revlimid which is apparently one of the most expensive chemo drugs out there due to liability. It’s supposed to have few side effects, but he has to take it for life and the pre-insurance cost is $8,000/month. Even at all time gold prices, that’s worth more than its weight in gold- literally. Hopefully he will be ok and his doctors don’t beat him up too bad with the treatment. When I went to the doctor with him they were thinking they could do only the pill and no raditation. Apparently something changed with an MRI that prior bloodwork didn’t detect.

Thoughts go out to Julia and Brian as Brian seems to be undergoing his own fight with the beast. Send Brian a tweet of encouragement. Seems everyone’s got their battle these days, as even Senator Kennedy is having his own battle after surgury at Duke (apparently the same surgeon worked on my friend Chris’s back for some spine problems).

I think the best words to sum it up are: Cancer Sucks.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 11:49 pm and is filed under life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.