Thursday, July 15, 2010

Milk thistle -- hold the thistles please!

First, the second half of my return from Orlando story.  To make a long story short, I am learning that spicy food of certain types do not sit well on Thursdays given Velcade.  I had some Mexican in the Orlando airport and spent the first hour of the flight uncomfortable, the second hour very uncomfortable, and the next 15 minutes throwing up in the toilet at the back of the plane.  After which I felt considerably better.

Things are going well.  I am noticing that constipation requires earlier action.  My cadence was one senna pill on Wednesday evenings and maybe on on Thursday mornings.  I have found now that Tuesday night, Wednesday morning and Wednesday night are required.  May take one more tonight.  I'm not sure if it gets worse as I take more Revlimid during a given cycle but I have five more pills to go on this one.

Otherwise things are good!

Now here is a chance for you lurking homeopaths (those that I haven't scared away by my complete embrace of deadly chemicals) to chime in.  I didn't lose and regain my tastebuds two separate times to never enjoy wine again.  In fact I enjoy it quite a bit.  Plus my liver is lightly taxed by my lipitor.  There are four liver markers -- two are always fine, one is usually fine, and the fourth is consistently a little high.  I have been taking liver.52 which I get from Amazon and that brought the third marker well into the normal range, but the fourth marker -- ALT which is the short-term enzymatic response to lipitor and alcohol, is still around 100 when it should be more like 70.  These are not catastrophic numbers and BB as well as my local oncologist GD say everything is fine (BB's one comment in dictation to my file last year was that "patient probably needs to drink more").  But just for kicks I bought some Milk Thistle which I've been told is good at helping out the ol' liver.

Well I took this for about three weeks and I noticed what I thought was bone pain in the lower right ribs -- which scared me at first because that's where one of my lesions was.  But it's actually a more dull pain and it's the liver!  So needless to say, I'm stopping the Milk Thistle.  I will look and see what's going on with the blood chemistry.  If it brought down the ALT I may continue with it on a smaller dose (I had been using the "management" dose of 8 capsules a day versus the "maintenance" dose of half that). 

Not the most exciting news, but it had been a while since my last post, so...