February 14th, 2016

Last Thursday I had the long-awaited scans that we hoped would show I have No Evidence of Disease (NED). I'm completely comfortable with that kind of language. No Evidence of Disease is a much more realistic phrase than pretty much anything with the word "cured" in it. At best, all anyone will ever be able to conclusively say is that currently I show no signs of cancer. With tricky, aggressive cancers like DSRCT, you really never know for sure that it's gone forever. You can only know for sure that it is there. It's kinda like aliens. We'll only be able to prove they exist when we run into them, but the fact that we haven't found them yet just means we haven't looked in the right place at the right time. OK, not a perfect example, but you get the basic idea.

That's all fine with me. I understand that a declaration of NED wouldn't be a guarantee of health. It would mean that I'd be able to go 3 months between scans though, and that I could start living life three months at a time, and dare to plan for the future, at least a little bit. So you see why I was hoping for NED results from my scans. I also remembered well that it was entirely possible the results would definitively show that the cancer had returned. It's happened to too many people we've gotten to know this last year of treatment. So my wife and I hoped for the best, remembered the possibility of the worst, and really just didn't think about it much, choosing instead to enjoy the time we had, rather than agonize over upcoming results. We were prepared for a clear answer either way; NED, or new tumor activity. We weren't expecting another vague scan result, warranting another follow-up scan in 6 short weeks.

Previously, my scans showed mysterious fluid in my abdomen, which they drained, and two identical spots on my lungs, likely inflammation. Thursday's scan showed no fluid (yay!), and the spots on my lungs were gone (yay again!). But there is a new spot that looks the same as the old spots (meh?). Hopefully it's just a bit of inflammation. That's what the other two, which looked the same, were. But we'll see in six weeks. For now, we make do with what we have. It's half the time we were hoping for before the next potentially life-altering scans, but it'll do. We're amending our planned "Grand Road Trip of Pretty Much Every National Park in the U.S. and Canada," making it more realistic for our shortened schedule. That and the fact that we're doing it in March, when the Rockies are still buried in snow. After we travel, it's scan time again. Maybe that scan at the end of March will finally give us the results we're hoping for. Or maybe it'll be another vague result, or a definitively bleak one. We'll see. The point is that my life makes obvious what is true for us all; none of us knows the future, and we could die at any time. There's no point whining about it. The best any of us can really do is not squander the time we have, and appreciate every minute for what it's worth.