One To Go!

Well, I'm down to the last treatment - 11 down and 1 to go. I had gone on You Tube trying to find an excerpt from "Bad News Bears" (the original) where, in the championship game, the Vic Morrow character is shouting to his team, "Two down, one to go." Couldn't find it, however; so if you've seen the movie, just think of that scene and pretend you're watching it on You Tube.

So one week from now everything will all be over - I will have just been disconnected from my 5FU (that's what it's called) fanny pack for the final time. I have developed some key dates for me throughout this upcoming process:

• July 18 - Last treatment (where I sit and get IV's for 4-5 hours)


• July 20 - Final disconnect of the 5FU drug which gets pumped into me for 46 hours every two weeks


• August 6 - This is based upon when I went to Michigan a few weeks ago for my brother's funeral. That was during what otherwise would have been an "on" week for me so I had asked my doctor if I could postpone that treatment a week and was told that was fine. So by the time I traveled to Michigan, I had had two "off" weeks instead of the normal one. That weekend was the best I had felt in months. This gave me hope that after my final treatment, I will be able to recover rather quickly towards feeling much better. The weekend of August 6 would be the equivalent of having two straight "off" weeks so hopefully I will be feeling pretty good by then.


• September 20 - My doctor had said that it would take 6 weeks for the chemo to work its way through and out of my system by the time of my last treatment. I'm a little conservative on this so I'm allowing two full months.


• October 7 - This is the first day of my first real vacation of the year. We'll be down in Florida at our time share, sunning and spending time with our son Brian, his wife Lauren, and our grandson Tyler. Might even do some parasailing. Hopefully I will feel great by then.

It is my hope and prayer that next week is the last chemo treatment (#27 in all since the beginning of this) that I will ever need. I will certainly do all I can and all the doctors ask me to do to try to ensure that this is the case. I continue to thank everybody who has supported me during any or all of this process for me. Your support has been very instrumental in my keeping a positive attitude about this throughout. And of course I continue to thank God for His blessings upon me. I know for certain that this could have turned out a lot, lot worse for me than it did - not that it has been a day at the beach, but I am well on the road to recovery and I know many in my situation unfortunately are not. So thank you God for seeing me through to this point. Just one more hurdle to leap.