Five Years, almost....

Hi,
I just finished my last round of PET scans at UPenn and nothing showed up. Yippee! This means I am still cancer-free and have remained so for the last five years (I am just shy of that exact date but close enough to brag).

It is traumatic to go and have these tests done, to say nothing of the costs. I do not plan to do this any more. Five years is plenty of time for the melanoma to grow back and it hasn't so I am not going looking for it again. I see my dermatologist regularly and even he hasn't found anything to snip off me in over a year. I now not only see the light at the end of the tunnel, I feel the fresh air too.

Yes, I am a ticking time bomb, but we all are in one way or another. I heard a doctor talk about how cancer is not a noun any more, it is a verb. Our bodies are 'cancering' is how we should be thinking and discussing the whole issue of the illness. We don't catch it like the flu, we produce it ourselves. This is now causing the medical profession to think about how cancer is being delt with and treated. Maybe they will really start looking for why our bodies start to 'cancer' themselves.

All I know is that mine has stopped cancering for the time being. If I could figure out where the switch is I would shut it off permanently. I think that is the key to the whole problem, finding the switch. The rest is just treating the symptoms and fallout thereafter. My residual issues of osteoporosis, neuritis in my neck and a dropping shoulder from the surgery, chemo and radiation treatments seem like a small price to pay for beating the cancering in my body, but they are no fun to live with either. Fix one thing, break two others.

Looking back is easy. Would I have made the same choices knowing what I do now? Probably not. Would I have been able to look back five years? Maybe, maybe not. I don't get the crystal ball to look ahead either. One day at a time.... Just keep the keel in the water and head toward the light.

Xox
M