An Almost "Normal" Day

Sometimes things creep up on you when you're not paying attention, or when you don't know what to expect. Today was one of those days.

First I have to say that the weather was made for me today, about 65 degrees, no humidity, I was able to walk outside without feeling like I needed oxygen.

My partner in crime Larry and I took my mother grocery shopping. This is an event because she loves to shop and at 84 is in no shape to rush so lots of time is needed to navigate every aisle of the store once and maybe twice. I haven't gone on the last couple of expeditions because I wasn't feeling well enough. Today I felt OK so I figured what the heck, Larry can always bring me home if I get shaky, I'll go along for the ride. So we dropped Mom off at the cart corral and went to park the car. We browsed through a couple of other stores at the shopping center and then headed to the grocery store to meet up with Mom.

As we were walking I noticed that I wasn't out of breath like I have been when I had to walk more than 100 feet inside or out. This was a very nice surprise, I mentioned it to Larry and he said he'd noticed. Very Cool! So this made me take a quick inventory of symptoms and I realized that the nasty ,nagging cough that has been with me all day every day since at least April has all but stopped. Very , very cool!

Now I don't know why this is, my guess would be the chemo is doing it's thing and the tumor isn't taking up as much space in my chest as it was and giving me more room to breathe. Whatever it is I'm happy.

Reality tells me that I still have tough times to come and there will be chemo and radiation side effects in the future but today was as close to normal as I've felt in a really long time and I'm loving it!

My New Favorite "L" Word

I decided to add a nice double rainbow here today because, rainbows are a sign of hope and I got a bunch of that today!

So, today I went to see the radiologist. I really didn't expect much because I didn't think he'd have the test results he needed to help me figure out what's next. Turns out I was wrong. I need to back up a minute or month or so and explain that the kind of cancer I have ( small cell lung cancer) isn't "staged" like other cancers...of course it isn't, I have it don't I? Most cancers are staged from 1-4, 1 being very treatable and 4 being not so good. Well my cancer only has two stages, limited and extensive. Limited meaning the cancer cells have stayed where they started and not messed with anything else and extensive being they all got on the train and took a ride around your body. The bone scan I had yesterday was to see if we had any rail riders in our midst and I found out today I DON'T. This means my small cell cancer is LIMITED and this is a very good thing.

The only kind of "down " thing that I learned is that this tumor is very big, something like 11 inches long and about 2 inches wide so they want to do more chemo to shrink it as much as possible before they start zapping it with radiation. I was told that radiation can't differentiate between good and bad cells and they'll have to "zap" some lung to get to the tumor so the smaller the tumor the less lung tissue I end up losing. Works for me.

So I will do another round of chemo and then some scans and then we'll start radiation in July, 5 days a week for 6 weeks. I'll have chemo at that time too. ( Make note I may be crankier than usual at this time).

I'm very glad to finally have to answers to the questions I've been waiting for and I have to believe that all of your good karma and prayer and positive thinking helped make this journey this far. So thanks for helping me work on kicking some cancer butt !

Coming soon, the nutrition speech , hopefully a pic of my new favorite t-shirt and who knows what else :)