The News

It's a good news bad news sort of day. The results of the scans are in...(drum roll) and the winner is...The CT Scan! It shows all clear from cancer in my body including lungs, lymph nodes, heart, kidney, abdomen, etc. There is some leftover scar tissue, which is to be expected, but no mets. Awesome news.

The loser, The MRI. Not only did the tumors not go away but the one which is left increased slightly in size (3mm) and a new one (5mm) has appeared. Dr. Rado is cautious about panicking, since the increase is so minimal, the new spot is so small and mostly fascinating is there is no edema (swelling) associated with the tumors, which there usually is. But leave it to me to be different! I go from incredible swelling back at the beginning to no swelling now, when it should be. Strange. So, Dr. Rado wants to redo the MRI scan in 2 months and see what these two little critters have done and in the meantime continue the current chemo regimen. That includes continuing on the Abraxane, which is really for the body not the brain (it doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier) but since I am doing the other drugs I might as well continue this too just in case there are some hanger-oner cancer cells roaming about my body just waiting to make a comeback. So my standard therapy will continue over the next two months and then in early March we will redo the MRI and reexamine.

To say I am disappointed would be an understatement. I had suspicions that the tumor in my brain had not reduced at all and perhaps had grown. I can tell by my symptoms. They are not better or worse, just the same. I easily loose my balance and trip on my right leg, which sometimes forgets to pick itself up when I'm walking. Especially up and down stairs. I am waiting for the day when I crash on the stairs. I have fell going up the stairs quite a few times when I caught my right foot while it was lazy and didn't raise high enough to clear the step. I try to be very careful and hold the railing, but I just never know when I'll forget or maybe step and miss the railing. Its in my nature to hurry up and down those stairs and has been a real change of lifestyle to climb or descend the stairs with slow trepidation. I have misgivings about my stairs, and I don't want them to be my downfall (ha ha).

So I am slowly preparing for my trip to Utah this weekend. Pray for good weather! I have found out that one of the other attendees and I will sort of be "stuck" downtown for about 4.5 hours waiting for the rest of the group to arrive and the house we are staying in to be open, which is 5pm. I am a little nervous about having the energy to roam around a city for that many hours less than 5 days after chemo, but we can always take refuge in a starbucks or something and waste away a few hours. I do not know if she is in treatment or not, she sent an email introducing herself but didn't say anything about her status. I wanted to wait to respond until after today when I knew for certain whether I would be recovering from chemo, so I will write her tonight and give her my details. I will have to share a room with another attendee which is really hard for me. I am a restless sleeper, get up many times a night to use the bathroom and with all my sinus problems I believe I snore something terrible. I feel sorry for my roommate, I'll bring her some earplugs!

So two more months of this cycle and then we are going to check the brain again. Hopefully the cells will show a response and this time, it will be for the good! I am truly ready to get this treatment over but have in some ways resigned myself that this is me, this is my new life and it will forever be about surviving cancer one day at a time. But if I think about it, that's really what we are all doing, surviving our lives one day at a time. Overcoming obstacles, leaping over hurdles, sprinting when the situation warrants it. But we are all survivors, every day we make it to lay our head on the pillow one more time, count it a success. You survived.