Hi, hope you’re doing ok. If you’re not at the moment, I send my love and good vibes to you.
I'm on the 3-year BCG schedule for high risk non muscle invasive bladder
cancer. I’m assuming I’m on the SWOG protocol because it’s always the SWOG
protocol, right? That’s not a rhetorical question.
All the info I can find about SWOG tells me that after the 6-week induction, I should get one
3-week maintenance dose after 3 months, then another dose after 6 months and
then a dose after 12 months (i.e. after the first 2 maintenance doses, the gap
between doses extends from 3 months to 6 months).
Problem is, as you’ll see from the attachment, that’s not what’s happening in my case. They’ve
already given me 3 maintenance doses with only a 3-month gap between them and
in January I’m about to get a 4th dose with only a 3-month gap.
This bothers me because I’ve been getting some bad side effects from the BCG (i.e. I sometimes
need a Tramadol) so I don’t want to have more BCG than necessary in case the
side effects get so bad I have to stop the treatment altogether.
I emailed my urologist and asked him about it but he just attached a SWOG schedule and said
see you in Jan. Suspect he speed read my query. Or it could be I’m misunderstanding
something. Anyhow I’d be grateful for your thoughts.
