Today, September 8, 2017 started and sort of ended with mini pity parties for me. We had a speaker this morning and I needed to go to the office ‘annex’. For some reason transportation decided they needed to get me to my 8:45 meeting at 7:30. Never going to understand that.
I was accepting of it and took along things to do for an hour. I am getting used to the indignities of the state subsidized transportation system.
After all, I am ‘handicapped’ and ‘elderly’. (You know I find that hysterical; don’t you?)
I was okay with it until my colleagues started to cluck their tongues and make a fuss over the absurdity of it all. Apologies for not thinking to offer well ahead of time and promises to do better. I was chastised for not asking by half the room. Then I had to fight the impulse to cry.
Not sure what upset me. It could have been being reminded it is not fair, whatever that means. It could have been their willingness to help. It could have been being reminded I am now different. Maybe a combination.
Whatever it was, sometimes it just smacks me (you, too?) between the eyes. Believe it or not, I am often able to forget I am now handicapped/disabled/impaired/whatever. Other times….I am sitting by myself an hour and a half early and people feel sorry for me and I feel sorry for myself and that is all she wrote.
The rest of the work day went great. Busy and sort of productive. Of course, I had to get a ‘seeing eye colleague’ to read a particularly blurry fax to me, but that was not a problem. People help.
(Of course this was the same colleague who was making the cracks about allowing the one, ‘blind’ staff member to cut the baby shower cake we had for another colleague! News flash: I could not cut equal pieces when I could see! Bringing to mind a corruption of an old joke: “Doctor, if you fix my vision, will I be able to cut a straight line?….Funny, I couldn’t do it before!” Da dum dum!)
And fixing eyes brings me to the second letdown of the day. I – and I believe others – have been thinking lampalizumab was a slam dunk. It was going to go breezing through the phase 3 trials and help to cure the world. Did not happen. Lampalizumab failed to show a statistically significant effect as compared to sham and the one trial has been terminated.
I looked all over the web trying for specific information and all I found was the press release repeated by about eight, different services. Not sure what happened and I don’t believe they know what happened. Here’s one version of the press release from BusinessWire.com.
Not that I am anyone you should listen to, but I would recommend not giving up yet. They still need to further analyze the data. It is possible they got a split just as they did the last time. Maybe 75% of the samples were non responders but the other 25% responded with a 40% slowing of the degeneration. 0 + 0 + 0 + 40 divided by 4 is 10. An average of 10% would not meet criteria but the 40% would.
Just wait and see. Some days have bad patches, yes, but they often are just that, patches. In the big picture, we are doing okay. Keep on keepin’ on.
written September 8th, 2017