The Colon Club

My dr. and i decided on a 5 week break. Thanks to all who answered.

Nicole

Hi Nicole ,
Enjoy the break ! Have some rest and squeeze in some treats .
Stu

Thank you so much, Stu. Will be enjoying Mexico in a couple weeks too!

Have fun in Mexico. It’s amazing how much better I feel when I go someplace warm. I’ve spent months pretty docile mostly in bed not feeling too well. Then I go to the beach and did this 2 days ago:


I should really move. Not sure I’ll survive another winter...

It’s always warm in AZ!

My issue with chemo breaks is that it’s very difficult to go back on it, of course I’ve had 80 plus rounds.

Pyro70 wrote: It’s amazing how much better I feel when I go someplace warm....Not sure I’ll survive another winter...

Dude, in the words of Jimmy Buffett:

I gotta go where there ain't any snow,
where there ain't any blow, 'cause my fin sinks so low.
I gotta go where it's warm.

So obviously the answers to all our woes are boat drinks!

Have a fantastic break .

That photo looks fantastic Pryo70 . We have big waves but rather chilly at times here in Scotland . Ha . Thankfully we are hardy . Straight after my mum’s liver resection she kayaked for the first time in the sea . We did give her a wet suit , took a few attempts to get it in the right way . She loved it .

Keep having fun ,

Stu

Maintenance is about what is tolerable and effective long term. If you can get extra immune and chemo activity, especially to dissolve lesions somewhere, that would be a plus. There are dramatic, published patients' success series with improved maintenance regimes, e.g. ADAPT (Xeloda + Celebrex). I was impressed with some mCRC ADAPT patients' stop and start performance, although we decided absolute treatment continuity would be more important to us, for 8 years. My wife has now been on immunochemo vacation for 11+ months. There may be types of patients where ADAPT out performs xeloda plus Avastin, as did some of Dr Lin's earlier published work.

Our idea of maintenance is to enhance chemo activity further than that, and to improve the tumor, immune, inflammation and liver parameters as much as possible. We used UFT+LV instead of Xeloda, and a lot of selected high potency supplements. Several years out, we added celecoxib and immune modulating supplements to the stack, saw an improvement in chemo activity and tumor markers. Site by site we've picked off lesions, chemically and surgically. However my chemistry comments are most grounded on the CA199 - RAS/BRAF mutant/mixed - CEA axis ( + CSLEX1), common but deadly metastatic types in the national statistics that might be fewer % here.

My view is that we need to get oncologists, MDs and NDs' combined efforts to increase their simple, targeted, generic chemistries performance at the individual patient's level, beyond current daily Xeloda based formulas and weak tea supplements. BC has clinics that might be good for that.

I had two chemo breaks. One was for one week - my numbers weren't great, the side-effects weren't going away and I felt rotten. The other one was probably for a week as well and I don't recall the reason. It may be that I just didn't feel like doing it.