February 27th, 2017

Earlier today I wrote out an entire blog post about my recent scan results and how I felt about them and the next step of treatment, but now it’s somewhat irrelevant! The scan results didn’t change of course, so I’ll leave the section about them here, but the plan of treatment isn’t what we thought it would be so I’m rewriting that paragraph. And that’s a good thing. The results were much the same as the last several scans now, with mixed news that mostly isn’t great. In the “good news” category, there still are no new lesions. I haven’t had any new spots show up since…last April, I believe? Just keeping this kind of cancer from spreading is a success in and of itself, and I need to remember that more. Moving towards more mixed and discouraging scan results, most of the lesions they’re keeping tabs on grew a little. Not by much, but it’s still a trend over the last few scans. A couple of spots shrank, which is a little odd since most of them grew, but every spot became a little more PET avid, that is, more active and quick to uptake nutrients (and, presumably, to grow). So, the current chemo I'm doing isn't exactly working wonderfully, but it doesn’t seem to be becoming a frustrating cycle.

But we got a phone call this afternoon and I’m penciled in for another tumor resection surgery this Friday! I don’t know too many details yet, but it probably will be laparoscopic in my chest and may involve reopening part of my main incision scar that runs from my sternum to my pelvis. I’m not sure yet. They’ll confirm everything tomorrow, so we don’t know exactly what it’ll entail or if it will for sure happen Friday, but it most likely will. This is great news. For one, surgery has always been my favorite of all the treatments I’ve done. Second, I was getting pretty frustrated with the chemo I’ve been on, since I don’t like chemo and it was only keeping things somewhat in check rather than moving towards a clear scan like we wanted. While on the one hand it isn’t so good that these spots have grown large enough for surgery, it’s also great that I can get them surgically removed. I’ll just focus on being thankful that I qualify for more surgery and hope for the best!

In the meantime, I’m going to get back into writing more and spending less time working on getting a publisher. It’s just not healthy for me to neglect my chief creative outlet and main hobby while wallowing in the quagmire of unanswered emails and drawn-out rejections that is the publishing process. I get more rejections—which are always better than never hearing back—nearly weekly. Lately I’ve become more and more discouraged with the length of the publishing process, and I’m looking into more options like smaller, independent presses. We’ll see what comes of it, but for now I’m just going to take it easy with working towards finding a publisher and enjoy writing more.