March 16

Round 2, Day 5   Kerry's words of wisdom for the day:  Saliva is highly under rated.  If you don't think so, you don't know spit (or the side effects if his treatments).

Kerry has completed his treatments for the week. Low blood pressure continues to be a controlling factor for whether he gets a dose.  They are keeping his blood pressure artificially high (ie in the normal range) with neosynephrine -- checking his blood pressure every 15 minutes and adjusting the neosynephrine accordingly (try getting any sleep with that kind of attention). He got 7 out of 14 possible doses this week.   They say that 8 seems to be the average for the second week of treatment -- so I guess he did pretty well. When the doctor asked him how he felt about not getting any more doses this week, he responded "Relieved!".

As of this morning, Kerry had gained 20 pounds of water weight.  They had to cut his ID bracelet off because it got too tight. His eyes were pretty darned puffy too. Since most of the water weight settles with gravity, I can now confirm that he has a good butt.

Kerry will have 4-6 weeks off before they do a scan to see if the treatments are working. He will go home tomorrow or Sunday (when all of his labs are within the acceptable range) and be on the couch for the next week sleeping and shedding skin (another lovely side effect of the IL2).  One of the nurses suggested that we look into going to Viet Nam where they have fish that do pedicures.  Apparently, you put your feet in a pool with live fish that gently nibble the dead skin off of your feet.  Not sure how this would work with Kerry since every inch of his body is peeling -- but its worth looking into in our spare time.