CR 489: Infusion 42 and autumnal adventures

Last week Jennifer and I went to our (still unsold) lake house to pull the boat and jet ski out of the water, get them winterized, and ready the house for the winter. It was a beautiful October day with temperatures approaching 90 degrees. We took a long boat ride, jumped into the lake (still a balmy 84 degrees on the warm side), then I went to rent a truck to pull the boat out of the water. Unfortunately, the truck I rented was not a 4x4, and after I had loaded the boat on the trailer and started pulling it out, the rear wheels started spinning on the gravel above the concrete ramp. I tried backing it up and down several times, but each time the rear wheels spun out on the gravel. The eighth time that I backed the trailer down, the wheels were on the edge of the ramp. When I tried to pull up again, the wheels started spinning, one rear wheel dropped off the ramp and into the mud, and I was stuck. It took a tow truck to pull me out. Fortunately, the only thing damaged was my pride. 

Today I drove up to Hopkins and checked into the Weinberg Cancer Center as usual. That’s when I learned that my appointment with Dr. Hahn was in the outpatient center, which is in a different building a couple of blocks away. I’m getting better at navigating through the dozens of buildings that make up the Hopkins campus. All of my labs and vitals were normal. During my visit with Dr. Hahn, he mentioned that Merck had recently released the results of its Keynote 45 study that compared its immunotherapy drug Pembrolizumab (Keytruda) to chemotherapy for metastatic bladder cancer. The results showed that immunotherapy was so much better that the trial was stopped early so everyone in the trial could get immunotherapy. This is wonderful news, and once should increase the long-term survival of metastatic bladder cancer patients. Dr. Hahn said that, for the first time in his career, there was a significant demand for more mets BC patients to enroll in clinical trials, since there were so many promising immunotherapies that needed to be tested. I’m happy to do my part, and will evangelize to get others to enroll. The only thing you have to save is your life.

Tomorrow Jennifer and I leave for 12 days in Scotland and Ireland. The excuse for the trip is that we’re celebrating our 33^rd wedding anniversary, but it was really an impulse decision in July once the UK went on sale after the Brexit vote. Air fares and hotels are cheap, and they’re practically giving away rental cars. The total cost to rent a car for 4 days in Ireland is $4. That is not a typo. And as a bonus, yesterday Aer Lingus emailed me to say that we had been upgraded to business class. Woot. If I had known that this retirement thing was so great, I would have done it a long time ago. Of course, it’s been a long strange trip getting to this point, and I’m not out of the woods yet. But then again, who is?