DAY 152 - One swallow DOES make a summer !

9^th July 2011 – To sum up the last days: OK, so, my chemotherapy is finally over. The 8 scheduled chemos ended a couple of days ago. In fact, I felt quite a relief when I was leaving the chemo department – but I will never forget the smell, the atmosphere, the people and their stories I had heard– all of that will remain engraved in my memory. They left me some two weeks to rest after the last dose.

By the way, this is how the chemo dose looks like (ABVD, approximately 1.7 litres of it each time = that’s around 14 litres of ABVD over the past 3 months, poor Hodgkin – it serves him right!)

After those two weeks, I went for a CT scan. And what about the results? More than 90% of the malignant cells have disappeared. Well, it is not 100%, but anyway, it is still an excellent result as I was told. The rest of it will be killed off during the radiotherapy which is due to start next week. To be more specific, a small number of enlarged lymphatic nodes remain near my lungs and in my neck, but the CT scan is unable to determine their activity, so it might be the case that the Hodge disappeared completely already. In technical terms, on average one malignant cell is boxed in by hundred healthy cells, which are way more difficult to kill (which is good though). So, the CT scan showed the clusters. We’ll see how the radiotherapy goes. I am supposed to get 20 dosages in the following days – that will also have a couple of negative side effects which I will describe on my blog, too.