Just Getting The Hang of It

Part X

We flew out to Philadelphia on October 1st 2017. My birthday. The first week in Philadelphia consisted of chemotherapy, an echo of the heart and a bone marrow aspiration. We were told how T-cell immunotherapy worked again as well as side effects, how the infusion process goes and so on and so forth. Now let me explain it to you. T-Cell Immunotherapy is exactly what it sounds like. A therapy using your own immune system. They take what is known as T-Cells from your body and put it through what is known as "processing" which in short means they "teach" or genetically modify the T-Cells to detect and destroy cancer cells. Now they do this by teaching the T-Cells to attack one of two strands of protein that the cancer cells produce. Don't quote me on this, but I believe the two strands are CD19 and CD22. Each T-Cell Immunotherapy program does T-Cells that trace either one or the other. For instance the protein strand that the T-Cells here in Philadelphia are taught to detect may not be the same one the T-Cells in Seattle are taught to detect. Though it will be one out of the two strands of protein they are using in this program. Let me just state that I don't know if they are or are not using the same protocol, just know different hospitals doing the CAR T-Cell immunotherapy Program is doing one or the other.

Going back to explaining, once the training is complete they infuse your body with the newly programmed T-Cells where then they will take off, multiply, detect and destroy all the cancer cells that are hanging out in your body. They will do what all cells do and slowly decline and fade, die out, however you want to explain it to yourself. The hope is that there will remain a small amount of these programmed T-Cells in the case that there is ever a return of cancer cells these remaining programmed T-Cells will kick in and once again do what they were taught to do: detect, multiply and attack.

Side effects consist of fevers, lack/loss of appetite, fatigue, nausea, headaches, some temporary neurological deficit disorders, which include, but not limited to slow processing and reactions, not mentally present, hallucinations in some cases, so and so forth. The neurological problems usually turn around in a day or so and you tend not to remember it. I'm probably missing some side effects, but the point is, it's not something you can't recover from. Also the neurological ones didn't scare because I doubt they would be any worse than the nightmare that is waking up from a procedure when their drug of choice to sedate you is Ketamine.

First of all let me tell you a little something about our dear drug Ketamine. Aside from, the fact that it is a hallucigen and sold on the black market as "special k", it is a GOD DAMN HORSE TRANQUILIZER. Waking up from this crap is hell. You're paralyzed for the first few minutes and the room in spinning uncontrollably. You feel so heavy like this giant bag of sand. Just awful. Makes me miss the good old days in Millers where they gave you Propofol. That beautiful milky white substance Michael Jackson liked. When you wake up from that it's such a nice crisp wake up. You feel so well rested. I wake up from that stuff feeling like tap dancing and I don't even dance. Anyways, I'm just saying Propofol is just better. This is the point where I should comment that I in no way am a drug addict or addicted to the substance known as propofol. It is just my preference of sedation.

Another reason I wasn't scared of the side effects was that all in all it wasn't much worse than what I already went through with the prior 5 years of treatment. The only thing worse than waking up from Ketamine, was once during the middle of an Lumbar Puncture and Bone Marrow aspiration and biopsy I woke up from sedation right after the LP and as they were getting started for the bone marrow. I made muffled noises and let them know that I was awake, but the person next to me was like "No, it's okay we're almost done. Just hold my hand." and then held my hand as they continued on and did the bone marrow. I would have cried if I wasn't so drugged up and I could, but like I said earlier waking up from ketamine makes talking and crying hard. That was by far the most physically painful thing that had ever happened to me. It hurt so bad. Felt like someone was sucking the life right out of you. You feel as they push that needle into your hip bone. Dig its' way in there and then just suck up like a vacuum. You feel it all the way to your toes.