My (Slightly) Glowing Report

The MRI was definitively stable, even slightly improved. Most of the spots have either gotten a little bit smaller (by about 1 mm - but I’ll take it!) and/or become less bright on the scan. I’m calling it “stable plus.” I was very pleasantly surprised by these results! Now I am only traveling to Colorado once a month. And that will feel like a breeze!

Catching Lightning

These past two months of treatment on my fancy new clinical trial drug have passed fairly uneventfully. Side effects here and there, plus massive amounts of travel, but all in all not too much to report. Mostly, I’ve just been trying to convince myself that everything must be fine, since I feel fairly decent.

But now scan day, April 8th (our 13th wedding anniversary) keeps marching closer, and no matter how hard I dig in my heels and try to make the world stop turning, the calendar pages continue to flip. Time for me to step up and face the truth that the scan report reveals.

The gravity of these upcoming scans reminds me of my August 2013 scans (on Jason’s birthday). Those were my first scans after starting chemo, and we knew that the report would largely foretell whether or not my cancer would respond to treatment. And the report was remarkable.

But that was my first line of treatment. I am on my ... fifth (or maybe sixth?) line at this point. The odds of a good outcome go down with each one, meaning I am now deep into the unenviable category of the “heavily pretreated” patient.

But, I’ll try not to think about the outcome until I have to.

For now, I’ll keep savoring all the little joyous occasions ... trying to hold on to these ephemeral moments that slip through my fingers like sand.