Detour

Well, we almost made it out of Germany. We woke up at 3am Saturday to head to the Munich Airport. I was feeling weird pains in my side but ignored them -- we had to make it to the airport and turn in the rental car by 6am for my 7am flight to Amsterdam.

We didn't make it on the first try. We only made it 5 miles down the road and the pain was excruciating, I couldn't imagine driving the 2 1/2 hours to the airport. We turned around and tried to imagine how we could reschedule both of our flights.

Twenty minutes later (after some aspirin), I felt better and was determined to make it, so we headed out again. It was still pitch dark and raining cats and dogs. The car navigator picked the weirdest route for us in all creation -- through every little town and curving mountain road, which of course was a real joy to navigate in my condition. After an hour of this, I really couldn't drive any more, so Liz took over. Finally, on the motorway to Munich, I realized that I was doubling over in pain. We decided to call Herr Dr. Thaller, and fortunately he answered the phone at 5:30am, and told us to come back to the clinic for an examination.

After a quick ultrasound once-over, he diagnosed me with a swollen lymph node, which was blocking the ureter from the kidney and causing pain. He sent us to the hospital, and fortunately they found out that a big dose of ibuprofen would keep me out of pain for a few hours. They told me to wait overnight, and if I was still in pain, I needed to go to a bigger hospital with a urology department.

So then we began to wait. (Meanwhile, we had to find a new flight, a place to stay for the evening, etc. etc.) The ibuprofen worked like in a charm, but going to bed that evening I felt woozy -- and that night I sweat more than I ever have in my entire life. The bed was literally dripping from head to toe, I must have put out a couple of quarts of sweat.

But by morning I felt great, and didn't need any more ibuprofen! The sweatstorm was the breaking of the fever, or infection, or whatever had caused the lymph node to swell up. And in retrospect, it was to be expected with the dendritic cell therapy: my prostate had previously swollen up for a couple of days. In the fight against cancer, infection is a great tool: it's what happens to me every day during fever therapy, and almost every example of spontaneous remission has involved a serious infection. Something about the immune system absolutely flipping out allows it to attack cancer cells that it had previously ignored.

Today we had a 6-mile hike through the mountains to the next village of Pappenheim -- it was a perfectly gorgeous Fall day and I was so grateful to be walking through it.