nickysfight's Cancer Blog

February 7, 2007

FOLFOX CHemotherapy

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Hello All!
My sister Aimee has designated me the “technical blog writer”, simply meaning that my job is to provide practical information regarding my mom’s colorectal cancer treatment and diagnosis – you know, the stuff that we wanted to know but were unable to find on the internet. Everyone’s case is different but I do think that it is helpful to hear what someone else is going through.

Here’s the current time line: On January 29th my mom started on FOLFOX. It is a combination of three drugs: 5-Fluorouracil (5-FU), leucovorin (a form of the vitamin folic acid), and oxaliplatin (Eloxatin). Everything I’ve read says that this is the most effective treatment for colorectal cancer. She goes in on Monday’s and sits in Dr. Barrington’s office for 2-3 hours while the FOLFOX is administered. She is then hooked up to a portable pump which administers Fluorouracil through her catheter for the next two days. She returns to Dr. Barrington’s on Wednesday of the same week to have the pump removed. And, as my sister said below, she then gets 10 days off. My mom is expected to continue on this cycle until approximately March 14th with surgery expected sometime in early April.

The side effects with this type of chemotherapy are supposed to be mild, but my mom has had a rough time of it. Partly, I think, due to not following instructions – my advice for any one going through this is: Whenever your treatment changes, do not assume that the anti-nausea, anti-diarrhea, pain medication, etc. instructions you have been following with your old treatment apply to the new treatment. For example – with her old regimen my mother took her anti-nausea medicine only when she felt nausea, with FOLFOX she should be taking her anti-nausea pills every six hours with out fail, regardless of how she feels. Not doing this led to a very scary week-end for everyone. Because she wasn’t taking the anti-nausea medication she didn’t feel like eating and stayed in bed for the better part of two days (fatigue from her anemia probably didn’t help either). While she stayed in bed for several days, she didn’t get enough fluid, which led to the extreme dehydration and weight loss my sister mentioned!

Monday, February 5th was a sad day indeed for all of us. It was confirmed that the spots on the liver are cancerous. It came as no surprise though as my mother had her biopsy on January 31st and at the time of the biopsy they had a hard time finding a spot to biopsy. Because I wasn’t able to find any reason that spots would shrink, other than as a response to chemotherapy, I wasn’t surprised at the biopsy results. What was amazing to me was that the FOLFOX chemotherapy had worked that fast in shrinking the spots! To understand my amazement, you must know the time line – my mom’s last CT scan was in the middle of January, just 10 days before and her first dose of FOLFOX was just two days earlier on the 29th of January. I haven’t met with Dr. Barrington yet, so I am not sure if I should be amazed or not … Has anyone heard of this treatment working so quickly on liver metastasis?