New year, new drugs to try

I hope you all had a lovely New Year's celebration. Not a lot happened round my way, but David spiced things up by participating in the Polar Plunge at the Boulder Reservoir. I don't know who started this trend of running into freezing cold water to ring in the new year, but I'm not surprised. People will stand in line and pay lots of money to do all kinds of weird things. Brent and David and I all went to the plunge on New Year's Day.

There was a decent crowd gathered, with a warming tent where beer and pizza were being served. The crowd was divided into teams and individuals, and each entered the water in order of money raised for the cause (the cause being the American Cancer Society). Some of the teams wore matching outfits, like the guys in the speedos and bowties. The time came for the plungers to get in the water, and for the most part this involved bodies running full tilt into the water, flailing and splashing, sometimes high-fiving the rescue swimmers, then turning around and thrashing their way out. Then came David's turn. He went into the water at a slow, sauntering pace, sans splash. He got out to where the rescue swimmers were, turned around, and slowly submerged himself in the water. And stayed there. He stayed as his group ran out of the water screaming for towels, and stayed in as the next group dove in and got out. When David finally got out he complained that he didn't stay in the ice cold water as long as he wanted.

So my mom came all the way up to my house on Sunday just to help me clean and organize my loft area, which had become a dumping ground for piles of medical papers, bills, gifts and cards from the hospital, and who knows what else. I found a few gems and interesting artifacts, and I hope I haven't posted these already. Here is the result of one coloring session when Amie and Erin came to visit. Next time I swear I'll dip into that Abraham Lincoln coloring book.

Erin's masterpiece, brought to you by Andrea

Amie's masterpiece, brought to you by Liane

I also found a statement from my health insurance.

This is for a period of a month around the time I got transferred to UCHealth that one time. The VA billed my private health insurance $657,064.88. These numbers blow my mind. Do you know what I have had to pay out of pocket for my treatments so far? $16. Of course, that doesn't count the acupuncture and herbal medicine I get, and the visit to the Marijuana doc the other day to get my medical marijuana card. And billing might get more interesting now that I am getting funneled into a clinical trial going on at the Colorado Blood Cancer Institute, which is attached to Presbyterian St. Luke's.

Yes, it's been decided. As much as I love this time between treatments to hang out with family and lay around in pajamas and take a break from as many drugs as possible, it's time to try this curing cancer thing again. The clinical trial (experiment) I will be participating in is a phase 1 trial where they evaluate the safety of the drug in humans. The drug is called MEDI7247. This drug targets a glutamine transporter protein that is over-expressed on cancer cells, and delivers a chemo type agent into the cell through this transporter.

I won't talk too much about this study yet, because I'm still going through the screening process. Today I had an echocardiogram and a bone marrow biopsy. I didn't get sedation this time, so I popped some of my leftover lorazepam and dilaudid before the procedure. It probably helped with the procedure, but it also probably helped with all the needle sticks. I think there might have been about 6 of those today. Anyway, assuming all this testing looks ok, I'll start taking this drug on Monday.

If you were going to be experimented on, what kind of experiment would you agree to do?