My First Meeting with Ipi

With all the lead-up to today, it was a bit underwhelming. After sitting in the waiting room for 3 hrs due a mis-communication over blood tests, I was eventually hooked up to the IV drip. Twenty minutes of saline, with an anti-histimine added, then the small £90,000 bag of Ipilimumab was attached. There sitting in the ward room with Catherine, we watched as couples came and went, never sure who was the ill one of the pair until the line was attached. We were encouraged when Jane, a friend of ours, also in for cancer treatment, found us and spent a hour or so with us helping pass the time. All the while, this expensive serum was being trickled into my arm over 90 minutes. It’s so new that the nurse had to go and check on how particularly it should be administered. I wondered if I should squeak like a guinea pig.

Sitting here at home now, it’s a strange feeling. I have this radical new front line drug inside me, but I feel no different. The risk period comes in the next 5-12 days as the body absorbs it and I run the risk of developing Neutropenic Sepsis, a condition described on my info card to be as serious as Meningococcal Septicaemia. It means I’ve got to watch hygiene and situations where there’s the potential of picking up infections. So, do I become a hermit, or do I just live and act normally, albeit with care? Answers on a postcard please.
Thanks today to the wonderful Roger for the transport, and the supporting conversation. It’s good, in the middle of odd times, to talk about very ordinary things. But thanks also to so, so many people who’ve visited, sent cards or emailed or phoned, baked or mowed our lawn, brought flowers and prayed. What a wonderful army of compassion you are.
My reading in the scriptures took me through the book of Zephaniah today which describes a time when in God’s wonderful future…
The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing. (‭Zephaniah‬ ‭3‬:‭17‬ ESV)
I felt a good measure of it today.