I completed updating my blog with entries from 2005/6 when I was being treated for Burkitt Lymphoma at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. I rearranged the menus a bit and shared the link with my small group of correspondents. I am pleased that some, at least, have taken me up on it.
I talked with Dr. Edwin Choy, director of the Sarcoma Oncology Center at MGH. He gave me the basic spiel about osteosarcoma and the limited progress made over the last decade. I would be getting adjuvant chemotherapy (adjuvant means a treatment that helps improve the effectiveness of a main medical action, such as surgery). I get the sense that he is not yet read in on my case. He knows I had Burkitts, but not the specific chemotherapy regimen. It turns out that, even though it was over 20 years ago, there’s a lifetime limit to the amount of certain drugs that my body can tolerate. Lozano is sure that he got all the infected bone and that it had not metastasized, so perhaps the treatment will be “watch and wait” versus immediate chemo. Choy knows my oncologist at B&W, Dr. Eric Jacobsen, as well as Dr. Eddy Chen, my oncologist at Emerson. My hope, although we didn’t discuss this, is that any infusions could be done at Emerson’s Naka Infusion Center.