It's Hard to Know How to React to Good News
“Assuming no new tumors rear their ugly little heads in the next couple of weeks, it's possible that in the near future, I will have no active tumors in my body. That's something I never thought I would say.”
I took the Christmas tree down last week, and put it out on the street for the garbage men to pick up. It looked a little forlorn out there, no more ornaments or lights, just lying by the street. When I was little, we used to get our tree on Christmas Eve and then keep it up as long as we could. Our record was March 1. Why it didn't combust when someone just looked at it is still a mystery.
I didn't just feel bad because I thought the tree had come down much too early. I looked at it out there and thought that more likely than not, that was my last tree. It's hard not to sound melodramatic sometimes, but the way my cancer had been going, the spread to the spine, the growth of the tumors in my lungs, my doctors and I were all pretty much reaching the same conclusion: It was unlikely that I would survive the year. And I was pretty much at peace with that — as much as you can be.
Then a funny thing happened last week. Hope, which had been absent for far too long, reared its head again. I had just finished radiation on my spine, which my doctors thought would kill those tumors, or at least hold them in place. But there were still the tumors in my lungs, and some of them were growing.
Doctors don't know how cancer spreads. Did these tumors come from my very first tumor five years ago? Or do these tumors in my lungs send their poison off to other parts of my body now? So there is something of a debate in the world of oncology. Do you go after the existing tumors? Or as many oncologists say, do you worry about the cancer you can't see? Do you have to attack it systematically with chemo, as opposed to killing a tumor here or there? It's a little like trying to fight a brushfire. Do you spray retardant around the fire, or go in and stamp out every little hotspot?
We'd been leaning towards the hotspot approach, what the doctors call "spot-welding." I figured it couldn't hurt to kill the existing tumors, if that was possible, and then worry about whatever happened next when the time came. So last week we met with a doctor who does a relatively new procedure called Radio Frequency Ablation. Basically he sticks a needle through the lung into the tumor itself, and burns it out. And he is totally confident that he can kill the three active tumors in my lungs.
That means, assuming no new tumors rear their ugly little heads in the next couple of weeks, it's possible that in the near future, I will have no active tumors in my body. That's something I never thought I would say. To be sure, this is not a cure. I will be fighting cancer the rest of my life. I'll still have to undergo more chemo, and I'm sure that at some point, there will be new tumors. But this is the first time it has seemed possible to push back, to have the upper hand, even if it's just for a short time.
It's a little hard to get my head around this. I don't want to blow this out of proportion, but I am so used to leaving the hospital with bad news, that it's hard to know how to react to good news. Hope is funny that way. For now, I'll just enjoy the idea that those tumors have no idea what's coming their way. I hope it hurts them.
6:21 AM ET | 01-22-2007 | permalink
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