Chemo round 1

Caris again. Apologies for the lack of posts about chemo, but for now, no news is good news at our house! Round one of chemo went fine. Bill took his chemo pills from Wednesday through Sunday nights. He was diligent about the prophylactic anti-nausea medication and didn't have any trouble with chemo. One down, somewhere between 11 and 23 to go!

Bill did start having some fairly severe headaches Saturday and Sunday during his chemo treatment (he described 5-6 on the pain scale.) The hypothesis is that the steroid taper that Bill finished earlier that week was a little bit too fast (directly from 2mg of dexamethasone to nothing). The neuro-oncologist had Bill restart the taper from 2mg, with stops at 1mg and .5mg. He is feeling quite a bit better on the low dose of steroids and we were able to work from his office a couple of half-days last week. I'm inclined to agree with the steroid hypothesis as, according to the oncologist, headaches would be a very unexpected side-effect from chemo.

So we will be done with this second dexamethasone steroid taper on Tuesday this week. The steroid has a pretty long decay in the system, so he might not feel the side effects of coming off for a few days. Hopefully it goes better this time and Bill's head doesn't swell up and cause him too much pain. So far, he's been managing pretty well with regular old Tylenol and using ice to manage swelling. We are both looking forward to being back at work a bit more this week and getting to some semblance of this "new normal" we keep hearing about. At least for a little while before round 2 of chemo begins on October 14th.

Hugs for everyone that has been around to support us and just hang out with us when we need it. You are all the best and we couldn't do this without you.