A long time passing
And so the winter passed and the writing ceased. I spent time in my body, which seems to me to be slowly failing as I try one medicine after another. I got kicked out of a clinical trial when the cancer progressed right away. I tried another clinical trial medicine that dragged my blood pressure into the basement. I had back surgery again. I got a port. I dug deep into my body and it was not a place of light. Some of you may have noticed I stopped consistently responding to texts--a flurry one day and then the silence of a snowfall the next. I got a little cynical, which was not attractive. "Oohh, a clinical trial," people would exclaim excitedly. As if a clinical trial was good news. And I thought of all the mice who took the medicine before I got the nod. These are phase one trials. Of course, the people running the trial have reason to believe there is some efficacy to the drugs, but phase one also means the real goal of the study is to identify a dosage that is not toxic