and the story continues ....

Regular folks know that this blog has become (almost solely) about my Lymphoma ... I am not comfortable with the "oh poor me" undertone which(I think) comes with my disease and can get attached to the blog ... Since I don't want to be the "beechara" fellow... I would (hopefully sometime soon) start posting about more regular stuff (whatever that is) ...

And, from now on, I will mark lymphoma related posts with the label "Mission-Remission" ... this should help folks interested only in the Lymphoma story.

The past month and a half were supposed to be a break... a break from treatment which ended up being a break from blogging ... there was a lot of action in this time ... which would have made some interesting reading ... here's a sample ...

First there were the wild mood swings that came with steroid tapering-off ... I was taking some steroids as part of my Chemo ... actually "some" would be an understatement ... I was taking lots of steroids(about 10 times my body's natural production) ... This was soooo much that (in all probability) my body would have stopped making some of its own steroids (called "Cortisol") ... with the ending of chemo, the huge dosage of steroids had to end too - The plan was to taper the steroids down to Zero in 15 days ... these 15 days (and a week afterwards) turned into my personal flower-power days ... I went thru withdrawal symptoms that only the most wasted junky can boast of... there were cycles of depressive lows followed by ebullient highs ... lots of cranky behaviour that my wife(Afshan) gracefully endured, and I thoroughly enjoyed.

By the time the freak-mood subsided, my drug-induced diabetes had also vanished. Now I can hog whatever I like, as much as I like ... thank god for small mercies.

Then came the nice girl (Ananya Dasgupta) from CNN-IBN. She suggested that I do a citizen journalist report. Being ever so fond of "footage", I obliged and got my 5 minutes on national TV ... ideally I would have preferred being featured as a filthily-rich-guy... but that's still years away ... right now I have to settle for the citizen journo clip, which, apart from being for a good cause, qualifies as an "A" Grade look-mom-i-am-on-TV moment ... You can check out my citizen journo efforts at CNN-IBN website (by clicking here) ... The clip was immediately followed by a live discussion (Link here) ... pls discount the wrong age and the slightly sentimental pen-sketch.

I took part in the live discussion from Hyderabad ... had gone there to get a PET Scan done ... The scan is the one of the best available methods of detecting cancer ... it works like this - first they injecting some radioactive glucose in the blood ... then they take a picture of radioactivity that builds up inside the body ... Since the cancer cells eat-up 5-6 times more glucose than normal cells, they show up as bright spots in the PET Scan image ... My doctor tells me that my test results are good ... there is no "active disease" left in my body ... He shied away from using the word "Remission" ... mostly because the "residual mass" (leftover fibre and dead-tissue at the tumour site) has not reduced by the amounts that he wanted ...

So I am on "Mission-Remission" ... which starts off tomorrow with the first dose of radiation ... Will keep you guys posted about Mission-Remission and other interesting topics ...