New Siteman Cancer Center, Update on my Cancer
This post is about two indirectly related topics: the new Siteman Cancer Center building under construction on the Washington University School of Medicine/BJC campus and an update on my stage 4 kidney cancer.
Let’s deal with the latter first. You may have noticed I’ve not posted in three months, this is not due to a lack of topics, interest, photographs, etc. In April my routine CT/Bone scans showed that my cancer was progressing — tumors (yes, plural) were growing again. At that time I’d been on my 2nd line of treatment for 21 months, my 1st line of treatment lasted 18 months.
After a 2 week delay to select the next treatment, get insurance approval, and secure more grants for the huge monthly co-payments I began my 3rd line of treatment. Instead of the previous infusion of drug a every 4 weeks plus a daily pill I now take 3 pills daily (2 medications). For 12 weeks since my previous scans I had no idea if these two new medications were working, or not. Twelve weeks is a very long time to wait when you don’t know if medication is working. But I recently got the good news – my recent scans showed my tumors as “stable.” During that 3 month uncertain period I was in a bit of a funk. I’m in a better mindset now, ready to get back at it.
For 45 months now I’ve been a patient at Siteman Cancer Center, 7th floor of the Center for Advanced Medicine on the southwest corner of Forest Park and S. Euclid –one block west of the new building under construction. It’s clearly more crowded than intended — one treatment pod for 6 patients was originally the employee breakroom!
So when WashU/BJC announced in July 2021 plans for a new building it was very exciting. I just wasn’t certain I’d live to see it.
By including parking in the building it’ll make visits easier for patients and their family — the current journey from parking in the Euclid Garage to the Center for Advanced Medicine (CAM) is long. In addition to Siteman on 7 patients routinely visit radiology on 2 & 3. It’ll be nice having everything in a more compact footprint.
The new Siteman building will be connected to the rest of the Washington University Medical School/BJC campus via the interior elevated walkway system — aka The Link. The green arrow in the photo above shows where the walkway will go along the top level of the Euclid Garage, along the north side.
The new building is supposed to open next summer, so I’m fairly optimistic at this point I’ll still be around for lab work, radiology, and doctor visits.
— Steve
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St. Louis urban planning, policy, and politics @ UrbanReviewSTL since October 31, 2004. For additional content please consider following on Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, and/or X (Twitter).