L. and I went to Sloan again on New Year's Day, staying at a fab boutique hotel (with a Robert Mapplethorpe print hanging on our room's wall -- I was going to say it was vaginal rather than phallic, but now that I think of it, it was both) and eating our usual great meals.
I also had a CT scan -- nothing disastrous has cropped up in the last month, and the bad node is hanging steady at three centimeters, though it's hard to tell precisely what has changed since the last scan because of a computer foul up -- and a few other tests. The hold-up now in terms of starting the brivanib trial is the need to provide an "adequate" sample of my tumor. We were of course aware of this problem and tried to push the people at Sloan to work on it before we left town, but nothing happens until you are actually there so we are now up in the air about whether I will be starting the trial this week, next week, or several weeks from now after another biopsy. With any luck, I have enough tumor in the freezer (right next to the Ben & Jerry's!) to satisfy the study requirements and we can start right up. But that's unknown and unknowable at the moment, as the MSKCC folks haven't even asked for the slides yet. Sigh. So once more into the breech for L., who is both my loving wife and a badass patient advocate.
In the middle of my day of tests and waiting for Dr. Bow Tie we snuck off and had lunch at Zarela, a very good Mexican restaurant that's a few blocks away from Sloan's "outpatient pavilion." Margaritas were ordered, leading to much hilarity about me walking drunk into BT's clinic. "Drunk? Me? I didshn't tie that bow tie! Yer drunk!" (I actually stayed stone sober, though now that I reflect upon it, getting drunk wouldn't have been a bad idea...)
Update: Where's Tumor Waldo? Quite possibly on the way to Sloan-Kettering, apparently, thanks to an on-the-ball employee of MSKCC. So it looks like we will start on Thursday. As for the stuff up there... uh, never mind?
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