A journey
Last treatment was the 19th. Half of my chest is obviously healing. One-quarter is obviously not healing and may be worse (slightly swollen/puffy and always hot).
So I went to SCCA Proton Center today. They confirmed that it was good to come in.
Today was my last proton therapy treatment! The machine decided to remind me of day one: the first (of four) treatments took 20+ minutes (instead of <5). It really doesn’t like low barometric pressure/rain.
Like Monday, I took a nap this afternoon, although today’s treatment didn’t kick my ass like yesterday’s.
If you’re a tech geek, you probably read the webcomic xkcd.
If you’re not, you may not have heard of it. The cartoonist, Randall Munroe, made his doodles public in 2005. His tagline for the xkcd: “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.”
However, many of his cartoons might be better thought of as infographics. This is one of them.
Today was 23-of-28 days of proton therapy. I’ve been wearing no shirt whenever possible the past week because it feels better. I worked from home today for that reason.
I took a shower a half hour ago; the area along the sternum now hurts like a sonuvabitch. It hurts to put the lotion on it.
Everything stings – and it’s a hot bzzzzt sting.
I know how much worse it is today than five days ago. I can’t even imagine what next Tuesday will feel like.
Breast, colon, lung and hematological cancers “have high rates” of acquired resistance to chemotherapy drugs, including aromatase inhibitors for breast cancer. This phenomena, multiple drug resistance (MDR), is a major impediment to long-term cancer treatment.
That makes this research, published online December 6, 2017, groundbreaking.
[We] present the important in vitro discovery that the development of MDR (in breast cancer cells) can be prevented, and that established MDR could be resensitized to therapy, by adjunct treatment with metformin (emphasis added).
Continue reading “Metformin inhibits development of drug-resistant breast cancer”