Lift: The bad mood I left off on last time has lifted some. Had an appointment with my local oncologist today and he said that I still have options, but he's going to start me on a limited chemotherapy regimen next week, until we can find a suitable clinical trial for me. It's my understanding that this round of chemo will be weekly, with two drugs only, neither one prone to exacerbating neuropathy or indeed most of the usual symptoms that accompany chemo.

The doc also mentioned that the lack of result from the NIH trial wasn't that uncommon, and told me that he knew of someone else who seemed to be a perfect candidate but had absolutely no benefit from the experience. He said that it's likely that the immune system destroyed the beneficial cells before they had a chance to attack the tumors. Unfortunately, this is right at the frontier of medicine's current knowledge and remains a mystery as to why there was anything left to rid the body of the introduced cells after all the T-cells were allegedly destroyed.

I'm still in a huge amount of pain from my back/neck troubles, but at least we have a partial diagnosis: a compressed (pinched) nerve in my neck. I see a specialist next week; hoping that he'll be able to do something for me sooner rather than later (this has been going on for over five months now and I'm just about at my wit's end over it).

Hope to report something positive next week about my back in particular, and about my treatment in general.