6-3-13

The first couple of days at Dana Farber went well. Pre-screening was an all-day process; but everything turned out fine, and my first day of treatment on the clinical trial was last Thursday, June 2nd. I don’t have any complaints about the staff or facility, it’s just still all very different from what we’re used to. DFCI does get bonus points for having seat warmers in the treatment chairs though!


Day one of the clinical trial ABT-888 and SCH727965 was long! We arrived at DFCI a little before 7am, which means that we had to get up at 4:45a (which will be the case on each long DF day), and were able to leave DF around 6p to head home. Throughout the day they drew labs 12 times (ranging from 1-4 vials each time, totaling approximately 32 vials), corkscrewed a chunk of flesh out of my thigh and stitched it up (skin biopsy), gave me the results of my pre-screening ct scan (keep reading), gave me the ABT888 oral drug, and made me very nervous about the upcoming SCH IV drug; so a long but productive day, I suppose. The SCH IV drug is said to make patients very sick, so much so that people often return to the hospital to have additional fluids administered. I will receive a lot of pre-meds to attempt to minimize this; but we’ll see – just in case we are staying at the hotel across the street for the night. I have been taking the ABT888 drug twice per day since 6/2, the effects from that seem to be tiredness and waves of nausea.

The pre-screening ct scan showed that: “there are multiple liver lesions on the right lobe of the liver. Left lobe of the liver is almost entirely replaced with tumor.”, and there are several other nodes scattered throughout my abdomen as well. My next ct scan will be in mid-July; but not much is to be expected, confirmation that the trial drugs are working will take four months of therapy.

This week we are schedule for another 12 hour day on Thursday, June 6th which will include another 32 vials of blood, the administering of ABT888, 2 skin biopsies, IV pre-meds, and the SCH IV drug, then fluids, blood work, and ABT888 on Friday and again on Saturday.