Distractions

Sans (female) by Eric Fortune

Has it really been 5 months since I last posted?  Doesn't seem like it but clearly it has been.  Sorry!

I'm happy to report I'm still ok, showing signs of starting to fail on Xeloda, but nothing too dramatic.

Mostly, it's those stupid tumor markers (still? again? always?).  After that nice dramatic slide when I started Xeloda, it looks like my cancer's doing what cancer does: evolving around the treatment.  Regular blog readers and metastatic cancer patients will both recognize this as a regularly recurring  theme with cancer.   You can throw all kinds of everything at it but all the while it will be figuring out how to get around it one way or another.

No matter how much I just want to have this cancer wiped out and stop having to worry about it, that's not how it goes.  It's really just a life-long game of wack-a-mole, over and over and over again.  And lots of prayers that, God willing, there will still be mole-hammers aplenty to keep on whacking.

So anyway, tumor markers. Since last September, mine have been slowly going up.  Not a lot, just a little bit each time, a tiny little jump but it just keeps jumping.  So that's not terrific news.

I had scans (bone scan and CT) in October which showed some nice improvement since the April ones--the mets in my liver shrunk by two-thirds.  But it's just comparing 2 snapshots, without a lot of info on what's in between.  And besides, those tumor markers...

And on top of that, I ended up having a brain MRI earlier this month.  I'd been having these weird headaches on only the right side and they weren't getting better.  So of course I was afraid.  I had headaches and rising tumor markers and breast cancer which most likes to metastasize in bones, livers, lungs, and brains.  I wasn't 100% convinced it was brain mets, but I wondered.

Thankfully, my brain is still clear and I can stop googling "whole brain radiation" and "cyberknife" and "skull immobilization frame", so that part's good. And the MRI did show why I was getting those headaches, so that's also good, or at least helpful.  But it turns out some bone mets on my skull and the part of the spine at my neck are causing the weird achiness, nice and clear on the MRI and in exactly the 2 spots where I've been feeling them, so that's not terrific.

I still think it beats brain radiation, so I think I still get to count this one as a win.  But, obviously, as far as wins go, it's a mighty shaky one.  You kind of have to squint to see the victory in it.

So, in light of those tumor markers and the win-not-win MRI, plus just regular scanning protocols, my oncologist ordered more scans and talked with me a little bit about what comes after Xeloda, assuming thing keep going the way they seem to be going.  Not exactly what I want to deal with, but it's amazing what you can put up with when you don't really have a choice.

Now in the meantime, life's been pretty good, actually.  My stepdaughter got a great new job, my daughter got accepted to 2 colleges and is waiting on the third.  I started taking a dance class, had a nice Christmas and New Year's, some fun adventures, lots of great cooking, and am planning a nice couple of vacations later this year (assuming cancer and whatever's coming next is cooperative, but the expectation is that it will be).

I think if the only thing I had in my life was cancer, I'd be in a pretty sorry state.  I'm really glad it's only part of my life--an unpleasant part, to be sure, full of frightening news and unpleasant side-effects and a "can't look away" kind of way of drawing your attention all the damn time--but still it's not the only thing I have.  Which is a very good thing.

Now we'll just have to wait and see how these next scans go.  Never a dull moment with cancer, I guess.  More info coming soon.