Persist

​The end of another year calls for some reflection. I went back and read some of my previous blog posts. Dang! I really need to spend more time proof reading before I post. LOL Consider my errors your evidence that each post is written by a human and not some bot. While the dates on the posts and the calendar say that it has been a year, some of it feels like a lifetime ago. As I look back, it was certainly fitting that I chose Believe to be my word for the year. There were days, heck, more like months, when I had to lean heavily into it.
 
I ended 2023 with one last PET scan and Brain MRI. The thought of both brought a bit of anxiety. I tried not to think about the PET scan I had the same time last year. No one anticipated the news it brought of a new tumor in my left breast. I tried to believe that the great results for the last scan would hold over to this one, but it was hard. Thankfully the results did bring good news. Everything was stable. None of the tumors that were left had grown. The spots in my bones that had cancer still showed no sign of cancer at all. The other spots that had disappeared on the last scan were still gone and didn’t show any signs of returning. The tumor on my lung was still there, and the level of cancer activity was the same. The chemo doc said that this was a win, so I’ll take it. Trodelvy, the chemo that I am currently on, is working, so we will keep going on with it. Now that I am completely off the steroids, I do have a bad day with it, but it’s something I can handle. I just need to think of it as a day to binge watch TV and become one with the couch.
 
Next up was the Brain MRI. I was a bit more worried going into this one. My vision had started to be a bit fuzzy when on the computer or reading and my first thought was that a new tumor had popped up on my brain and was the cause of the fuzzy vision. The docs were great and told me that it most likely wasn’t a new tumor, but my body adjusting to not having the steroids in my system 24/7 and most likely old age. Phst! Who are they calling old??? Ha! The MRI went on like clockwork with the hardest part being waiting for the results and chatting with the doc to decipher them. I will say that I’ve gotten pretty good at figuring out what the written report means. When the report was posted to my chart, I didn’t hesitate to read it. Gulp… if I’m reading it right, it sounds like a mixed bag of results. I then took a deep breath and decided to do my best not to think about it and wait to hear from the doc. The good thing is my docs knows me pretty well by now and knew that I was going to read it. A short time later, on New Year’s Eve, I received a message from her about the results. I was right… it is a mixed bag of results. The good news is that the large spots that were treated earlier with radiation are still shrinking. This means that the chemo is doing more that we thought it would. Yippee for that! The bad news is that 3 of the micro-spots on the brain have grown. 2 of the 3 spots are large enough to treat. Because the spots are still very small a different radiation procedure, called radiosurgery, will be used. It should have less side effects and is more detailed in the targeting,​

Now that all the results are in, it is time to figure out what word would help guide me through the year. This really didn’t take to long for me to figure out. My word for 2024 is PERSIST. Believe will always be an underlying theme for me, but it is time to kick it up a notch. I have no plans on lying down and letting cancer win. I still have things to do, people to meet and places to go. The only way that I can do that is to fight for what I want. Persistence pays off. I will keep fighting cancer will all the might that I have. ​