The sixth dose of H-IL2 was hung on my pole and connected to my PICC line at 10 a.m. this morning. We slept until 9:45 this morning, if you can believe that in a hospital! Jill went out and bought the Mercedes Benz of fans. She got a table top model of the Vornado fan. They’re make in Kansas and I has been my experience that Kansas people know a thing or two about wind. So, we had a relatively cool room and I’m starting to get pretty tired from the infusions of HD-IL2. Sleep was really good last night — so good that we didn’t get up until 9:45am. Thank goodness that the nursing staff pushed the things that could be pushed and they were kind to give us some space.

The dose that I’ll get in just over an hour is number seven and we’ll be at the halfway point. I’ve developed some diarrhea. The most bothersome symptom is that I have developed a whole body sunburn. My entire body is bright red and it itches like a sunburn. My medical team says I’ll likely peel from top to bottom. That’ll be a treat, I’m sure. I’m also running a light-grade fever. It feels like there’s a war going on inside of me. I hope the good guys have got the bad guys on the run.

Because of the itching, I was given a dose of atarax. This medication made me pretty sleepy and I have slept a lot of the day today. As a result I haven’t been drinking as much water as I should, so my urine production level has dropped and it has taken on a whole new color, a little like the drippings left over from my last pot roast. Jill has been pumping water into me over the past couple of hours. We should get that problem rectified shortly. With the exception of that one bout of nausea and rigors, and up until right now, this treatment therapy has been fairly uneventful and easy to take.

With obvious flu symptoms coming on, I think tomorrow may be another day. This will be time time that I’ll be gutting it out like those windsprints our coaches used to make us run. When we used to be sure that just one more would make us pass out, throw up or both. Yet, for some reason, we just kept running. Now, like then, I will keep running. In spite of the pain and suffering, I will not stop until my body says, “damn, boy, you need to quit this!” I’ll let you know when that times comes.