Taking a deep breath….
Last August, after my first PET scan, I remember my oncologist’s expression before he brought up the scan for us to review. He wasn’t smiling. His eyes looked sad. He slowly hit the key to progress the images and pointed out everywhere that was lit up like a freaking Christmas tree to show me where the cancer was. In one image, I could see that it looked like an apron of Christmas tree lights was spread across my abdomen, fully covering it. At that time, I asked him about best case scenarios, and he told me I might have three years if I did well with the chemo, but my cancer was extensive, and he didn’t believe I’d ever be a good candidate for surgery to debulk my tumors. The best I could hope for was some reduction of the size of my tumors to prolong my life a bit.
The first thing I did after getting the news was to make an appointment to update my will.
Today, when he walked into the room, he had the biggest smile on his face. He said, “Let’s pull up the latest scan.” He opened his laptop and brought up the previous picture that was so colorful and beautiful with the intensity of all those awful lights. Then he pulled up last Friday’s scan and slowly hit the key to progress through the screens. There was nothing but gray scale pictures to look at. The ONLY place we could detect some activity was in my uterus, but it was a bare smudge of light.
He said, it was almost funny because the radiologist that read the scan thought I’d had surgery already to remove my omentum. That’s an apron of tissue that covers all the major organs in your abdomen. The reason he thought I’d had surgery was because there was no cancer to be seen whatsover. The “capsule” of cancer on my liver? Gone, too.
He said I’d done amazingly well, and that I am officially in REMISSION! He went on to say that I would be on immunotherapy from here on out and that he had patients who’ve been on it for eight years—so my prognosis is stretching into territory I couldn’t even begin to dream of when I started. Sure, it can come back, but we’ll be doing blood tests and scans to keep on top of it.
I could not have received better news. Now, I’ll wait for the surgeon’s office to contact me because I am getting that dang surgery to have my girlie parts removed for good.
Just thought I’d share the news because I couldn’t wait until tomorrow. We’re in celebration mode at the Devlin house!
