Dreams

7/22/07

“The right to happiness is fundamental:/ men live so little time and die alone.”

Bertolt Brecht – The Threepenny Opera, 1928


Friends and neighbors! Greetings and salutations! If my black humor sometimes seems over the top, remember two things: it’s my disease and I’m trying to be funny, and sometimes grim. Remember, in the words of Conway Twitty, it’s only make-believe. Consider the dream I had last night….a night of the living dead Zombie in nurses clothes lumbers aimlessly around a Caligaristic waiting room calling, “Randall Tessier, Randall Tessier.” Cringing under an out of tune piano being played by a twisted cuckoos nester clad in plaid I try to tell myself this is a blood draw and not the toxic infusion I so dread. IV poles in tow, the sad, gaunt faces of the bald and mangy point at me laughing, crying, “abandon all hope ye who enter here!” Dancing around them like ring around the rosy plaguesters, the newly initiated chant slogans from inspirational literature, “No pain, no gain! No Pain, no gain!” and then suddenly switch to “Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!” Meanwhile, a dog dyed dark green wanders in and takes a fluorescent orange piss on a candy cane fire hydrant. Suddenly, heralded by the sounds of trumpets and hosannas, a squadron of ghoulish nurses enter in masks and KKK robes to begin the black magic “ablations,” promising the immediate vaporization of my lymphic, magnetic tadpoles. Wearing masks with garish beaks, disco platforms with live goldfish in transparent heels, and tee shirts adorned with Tammy Fayes in various poses, they admonish my cringing as the cowardly act of a man that doesn’t know what’s good for him.
Waking up in a cold sweat, and vowing to write down everything I remember, I type out the following letter:

To the Ann Arbor News: Letters or Other Voices
Some Lesser Known Local Heroes
7/22/07

Those of you who saw the Saturday, July 14, 2007 New York Times front page story, “2 Lymphoma Drugs Go Unused, And Backers Cite Market Forces,” may not know that this piece reflects the critical importance of medical research now going on in Ann Arbor. The crux of the Times article has to do with a radical new treatment called radioimmunomtherapy. Pioneered by Dr. Mark Kaminski, M.D., Director of the Adult Hematology Clinic at the University of Michigan, radioimmunotherapy uses radioactive antibodies to search out malignant tumor cells and kill them. Rather than repeated cycles of chemo and side effects that take several months, the patient receives ONE test injection at the beginning of the week, and ONE therapeutic dose of Bexxar, the first of a new class of drugs called Radioimmunotherapies, later in the week, which is usually sufficient. That‘s it! Side effects? Blood counts may be lower in the weeks following the treatment. Nausea is rare and there is no hair loss. For those of you afflicted with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, a disease of the immune system that is the fifth most common cancer in the United States, what this therapy represents is an alternative to the misery of chemotherapy and the possibility of a better clinical outcome. With a single treatment of Bexxar, significant tumor regressions, including complete remissions, were observed in 70% of patients who had were either relapsed or unresponsive to prior chemo treatments. In fact, 86 % of those treated were alive and well and half had not relapsed eight years out from their out from the Bexxar therapy, according to the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Why am I writing about this? I have three reasons: 1) it is less a choice than a duty to enlighten those who lack access to life-saving information via media resources, access directly related to one’s socio-economic circumstances; 2) having been recently diagnosed with aggressive, large cell Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, I have a personal interest in understanding and promoting information related to advances in the treatment of a cancer that’s becoming more and more prevalent. Concerning the increase in numbers of those diagnosed with this disease, Alex Berenson writes, “Unlike some other cancers, lymphoma appears to be becoming more common; scientists do not know why.”
So what’s the third reason? To bring attention to the work of Dr. Mark Kaminski, his former U-M colleague, Richard Wahl, and all those who helped develop the Bexxar therapeutic regimen. While this therapy has only been used to treat follicular (non-aggressive) Lymphomas, it offers future possibilities for cases like mine. Finally, I can’t say enough about the excellence of care offered by the U-M Cancer Center. My physician, Dr. Asra Ahmed, has called me on weekends, forwarded my e-mails to Dr. Kaminski, read and forwarded my blog to those who might be interested, and insistently kept me in the loop on my diagnostic results and (because she knows of my interest in the research) all of the relevant studies being done on Lymphoma. And so my friends, I go to my first chemo treatment tomorrow.

Best to You and Yours – Randy Tessier