Zero Growth - It's Not Just for Economies Anymore!

I hate Scan Results Day.

So does Marcie. 

It's nerve-racking. 

We've had good SRD's and bad SRD's. Today was a good one! Dr Z says the scans confirmed what he thought all along these last several weeks - that my lungs were better. In this case, better means free of fluid, and with no new lesions and no growth of the ones that have been there. In oncology terms, that's a win. 

In fact, Dr Z says "we've definitely changed the natural course of the disease in your body." That sounded very profound, so I thought I'd repeat it here for you and let you ponder what the hell he meant by that, just as I did. 

The plan is to do two more rounds of the current regimen, scan again, then, assuming all's still well, drop the 1/3 of the cocktail that gives me the worst side effects. That's the light at the end of the tunnel I needed in order to get through more of these treatments. 

The other good news is that he feels I'm now healthy enough to apply for the drug trials I've talked about before. For some crazy reason, the drug companies would rather test on the current me than the me from early June who just had 3 liters of malignant fluid drained from his pleural space. So we'll see what we can come up with at Hopkins, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Dana Farber, or MD Anderson. Let's hope somebody out there will pick me! 

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I received some sad news over the weekend. One of my mother's first friends when she moved to Atlanta in the early 1960's was named Sarah. Her older daughter, Marlene, was diagnosed with breast cancer in her 20's. She has been battling ever since - for over 25 years! She passed away on Saturday. I didn't know her at all, but was friendly with her younger sister in high school. I always held Marlene as an example of why the statistics don't dictate the results. I'm sure that circa 1990 life expectancy for a 20-something with breast cancer was measured in months, not decades. But for Marlene, those numbers were meaningless. 

I'm doing everything I can to make sure the stats they quoted to me back when all this started are just as irrelevant. 

May her memory serve as a blessing.