August 4, 2021

So we enter week 3 of big doses of steroids to calm down my addled lungs. I would like to get off of them and back into the immunology component of treatment, but cancer has its own timetable. The way to stay sane with cancer, I’m learning, is to wake up each day, see what hand you’ve been dealt, then respond accordingly. Make the plan, execute the plan. Make note of details. Banish any sentence that begins with “What if_______” because that will only send you right over the edge. Now that I think of it, this seems like a good way to approach any day, not just one including cancer. 

Today was a reasonably quick visit with Dr. Oncology– an hour+, what with check-in, blood draws, etc.  I’d called yesterday because they keep telling me that if there any changes I should call, but I felt goofy because there wasn’t anything serious going on. The ozone-air this past weekend kicked off some tightness, I think, and then coughing, but nothing too much. As a long-time asthma person, it felt unlike other asthma instances, so I figured it was pneumonitis. And, it was probably asthma. 

But there are so many unknowns that we can’t definitively untangle them. Is the pneumonitis radiation triggered? How much of an immunologic component is there? There have been enough steroids floating in my system that the asthma should be settling down– unless the crappy ozone numbers have exacerbated things. I tend to be sensitive to ozone, too, which I always forget….So with no clear single path, we just need to not make too extreme a move. 

We kicked around a couple of options– I had the sense that it was more of a mutual decision-making process than in the past, which I liked. 

I’m going to do a few things to address the asthma, we’re going to keep the steroids at the current level, then next week, we’ll assess whether to drop the steroid dosage. 

One of the things I get to do is get a spacer to use with my inhaler. It’s basically a tube that you add to your inhaler. It holds the puff of medicine so you can inhale it slowly and deeply. Can you believe you need a prescription for that? We agreed it is ridiculous, but then she philosophized that it’s all part of the journey. This tendency always reminds me of her Irishness. When I opined that I would much prefer to have a journey that required a prescription for cookies, she laughed. 

Thanks for reading. Hope you get to eat some cookies soon!

Image by HeungSoon from Pixabay