Welll…
it’s the Labour Day weekend, in case anyone had forgotten that. It’s been quite a summer here for me, and not the one I had planned.
And now it seems to be coming to a close.
It was blazingly hot this summer, and there was much whining about that at chez moi.
Then, in that classic Vancouver style, it just flipped to late October rain one day and it mostly hasn’t stopped yet.
And that’s good because the province was so terribly day, but I confess I was hoping for some sort of middle-ground.
We are supposed to go camping in a few days and it would be nice to have the perfect combo of
– quiet
– sunshine
– fun
– food
and all the other bits that I am looking forward to.
I guess I’ll just have to wait and see what I get.
But back to my point, it’s been a really wild summer.
You all know that, I suppose.
It’s been a summer of being blown away by the stuff people will do to help.
And it’s been a summer of tremendous frustration as the number of things I can do becomes less and less and my boredom and frustration escalate.
I think it might be my weirdest summer ever.
I started out doing pretty well, feeling pretty well, having pretty good energy levels, and it’s been a bit of a downward spiral over the last month or so.
3 more treatments and no real reason to expect that I will have an easier time, physically, with those treatments than I have with the last 2.
And, at the same time, my test results have been really really good.
Yeah, I have spent a lot of time feeling like crap, but I knew I was going to spend a lot of time feeling like crap.
It’s just differrent when you are in it and you can’t change the channel or wait a couple of hours to feel like crap again.
So, yeah, I have spent a lot of time feeling lousy and lousier this summer, and still, the test results are the most important thing right now and that’s coming back just as good as anyone could hope.
And I think, ‘why the hell am I whining and complaining? I have been on e-mail lists with women who had so much more to complain about and they went thru hell and did their chemo and then had a recurrence really fast.
So, let’s talk about that, because I don’t think I have, and if I have, it’s been a while.
Ovarian cancer at this stage has a freaky high incidence of recurrence.
I was on an e-mail list with a huge number of women and I had to unsubscribe because it was just so terribly depressing how many of them only had a couple of months of being cancer-free before they had to start up with the chemo drugs again.
The original numbers from my oncologist were ” I have a 50/50 chance of still being cancer free in 5 years.”
Because the 5 year mark is the important line in the sand.
And if you run the numbers through various websites, the 50/50 number could be seen as being kind of generous. I have seen it go as low as 30/70.
And all that depends on a bunch of things, like type and stage of cancer and overall health and age and luck and all kinds of things.
And, the latest word from the oncologist is that, with the rapid decrease in my CA 125 scores and having those scores well within the range of a regular person, I am ‘in the group they consider most optimistically’.
I think it’s funny how I have adapted to the medical model and I just accept that that is the best he can say.
Can’t say as I blame him.
Anyway, all that stuff is pretty good news.
You may not see it that way, but basically, everything is chugging along in a good direction,
It is my profound hope that I just do these next few chemo treatments and do a ton of bloodwork for the next 5 years, but we just skip the whole recurrence thing.
When I start feeling like I was hit by a bus, I try to think about it as doing one really big, long hard thing and if I just keep plugging along, maybe I get to just wrap up the cancer thing and get on with my life again.
That’s what I am hoping.
And, I need to say another big thank you to Elaine for being so sweet and loving and for looking after two lives and for running her ass off trying to keep it all together for both of us.
I am a very lucky bastard.
And I am lucky to have the love and support of the folks who have been pulling for me.
Thanks.