BCG again

Well another round of BCG is in the books… literally… I have mentioned before that the book is purple… this was number 14.

I am happy to be back on full dose from a patient perspective, but not so happy for how BCG makes me feel.  The side effects that I was told to expect (by the internet mostly, and some commentary from other patients) haven’t really materialized. Emotionally, that makes a person wonder – “is the treatment working?”.

I have consoled myself that the median age of bladder cancer patients is 30 years greater than my own.  This should tell me that I should absorb the impact of treatments fairly good.

 

 

One of the key things about BCG, that I have mentioned before – is that it isn’t chemo. It is called immunotherapy.  The biggest thing to understand is that it uses your immune system to fight the cancer.  This leads to your body being drained of energy as your energy reserves are used “internally”.  I have found that over-exertion is quite easy in the weeks around treatments, and discussions with other patients advise me that it will take 9 months to a year to feel 100% again, of course this will be after BCG treatments stop.

My best guess is that if I run the full 3 year BCG program, I will have BCG again in June and December 2016, and June 2017. This is based on no other surgeries or anything impacting this program.  So, I guess I really need to look forward to 2018 then….

---

As I approach the 1 year mark on this blog, now is the time that I am preparing to make a pivot.  There are things I would like to change, and some other factors that make me want to do things differently on this site.  I hope to start implementing them in January – the true 1 year point.  I made a point of not making major changes from the initial vision during the year, in order to give it a proper assessment.  Now that I have more information, new decisions will be made.

Please subscribe to the site to get the updates when they happen (that is the subscription down at the bottom), and consider signing up for my newsletter ( has its own page at the top menu) for other tidbits of information every couple of weeks. My next newsletter will be a “top 5 or 10” of the year in review, and not posted here.

thanks

Rob