Thank you, first and foremost, for all of your assistance, love and compassion. When I receive a card in the mail, especially on a 'bad' day (since any day I'm alive is a good day I hesitate to call any day a bad day), it lifts my spirits and my heart. I thank you and the word "thank" cannot comprise the true nature of my feelings. My gratitude is without fathomable depths.
There has been a new setback which has caused a change in my treatment. The initial double chemotherapy plan of cisplatin and gemzar were successful in stopping the growth of cancer in my liver. Added to that, there was even some shrinkage in size. This is remarkable if you've taken the time to read the always fatal prognosis of my genetic cancer. Within six months of onset of symptoms (which come at the end instead of the beginning) 57 percent of the souls who suffer expire. I have survived that time by two months. I am in good mind state. My blood pressure is still like a child's with a reading of usually 110/70. My weight has only decreased by a much needed 40 pounds. I weigh 225 and at a height of five foot nine I can hardly be called svelte! My lungs are still operating between 96 and 98 percent oxygen volume. However, a little evil sneaked in with all of the goodness. In the last four months the cancer has spread in the form of small lesions, very few but they're there just the same, on my stomach and my lungs. I have responded by no smoking at all. I had re-started to deal with stress but not so much as a 1/2 a pack a day. Now, I sit here in the hospital, taking a new treatment which comes in two phases. I also have a nicotine patch firmly affixed to my hip. I'm doing everything I can to facilitate this next seemingly drastic step the cancer team at Siteman Cancer Center (a division of the Center of Advanced Medicine at Washington University) has taken to obliterate these new lesions. In phase one of my treatment I go to the regular outpatient chemo lab and they use a combination of three types of chemotherapy medicine simultaneously. This was very scary. I felt as if I couldn't walk. My jaw tightened and it felt like some hulk was preventing me from breathing by holding both sides of my chest. The first time I took this treatment a nurse had to sit in the room next to me. I felt safe but her presence in the room so close to me let me know how close I was to being in danger.
The second phase of the treatment involves a 46 hour continuous IV flow of a very serious (all forms of chemo are serious but this is one with so many side effects that I got tired of reading the list, fears mounted as well so I just set it to the side, treatment had to be taken no matter what) and also requires hospital stay. I am 28 hours into the first time of receiving this drug. The combination of all four has had a 2 out of 10 success rate for getting rid of these small lesions. It also has a 30 percent success rate for stopping additional lesions. It also has a fifty percent rate of no change at all. I am looking more towards being in the positive side of this drug. That's all I ever do since this ordeal began. I look to the sunshine and not the sunset. I know that no one has survived more than three years. I intend on being that someone who does.
I have a new address and I would be so pleased to receive any tokens of love you might decide or be able to send. More and more, because of the drugs I take to counteract the side effects of my chemo, my world is smaller. Soon, I fear, I will no longer be allowed to even go to the library. I continue to write and do research. I don't even care about publication or recognition. I keep doing what I love because I love it, no other reason is necessary. For example, for the last three weeks I have been deeply ensconced in discovering a 16th century lady known as "Lucy Negro." She is, she just has to be, the dark lady of Shakespeare's sonnets numbered 127 through 154. A. D. Cousins has referred to the lady of these sonnets as a, "tawdry affair" and another scholar (first name is Germaine I can't remember her last name) in her two chapter discussion of Shakespeare's wife's feelings regarding the sonnets completely ignores the sonnets regarding the dark lady. Why is that?
I've found Lucy Negro in very close proximity to Will's first theatre the Rose. I've found her so many times in Elizabethan history. She was a dancer at the court of Queen Elizabeth and somewhere along the way also entertained at court playing the harpsichord (see sonnet 128). She's a dancer, a prostitute, a property owner and proprietress of a brothel. And she's the force of nature which seemed to have driven the Bard quite mad with desire. And then, poof, she be gone! I'm working on writing a play about the two of them. But cancer seems to get in the way. I brought my materials to the hospital but I can't seem to stay awake long enough to get my momentum going.
That's enough for now. Please think of me, write to me, send me a card and it doesn't have to be a card which contains anything (although if you do it will be more than appreciated as I still have yet to secure insurance to help with the cost of my home medications), just let me know there are people out there in the world who care. As I started to say before, I am not allowed, due to my compromised immune system to go to any public places. I cannot go to most people's houses because of various reasons such as children going to school, elderly relatives, and quite frankly the level of cleaning the homeowner executes on a daily basis. I sit on my front porch and read for hours on end. And to be brutally honest, I've never felt so alone in all of the forty six years I've been on this earth. My Sarah is my only joy. My sons attend to me when their schedules allow. I was not ready, not in the least, to be confined to such a loving jail. Please keep me in your prayers. I believe that your prayers worked the miracle of my liver. This is so rare with my disease. You cannot possibly know, unless you've looked it up, the fatality of this disease. Your prayers and my hand in God's hand has brought success to the doctor's treatment. Be proud of yourselves. I am.
Thank you all. Here's my new address and I've also attached some photos of all of us. They were taken moments before my hospitalization of this week.
La Vonda R. Staples
5906 Boulder Creek Drive
Apartment 2006
Hazelwood MO 63042
My new telephone number
314-7310-1176
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