i just had to share this with y'all
i swear i just got done with jury duty less than 2 years ago .. of course, its really not convenient for me to serve on a jury right now .. i've got chemo brain and i'd have to have them keep repeating themselves .. plus all these digestive problems that go hand-in-hand with chemo .. well .. lets just say i'd be calling a lot of recesses lol
there IS a box to check that would excuse me from jury duty but i need a note from my doctor .. that just doesn't sit right with me .. i'm almost 50 years old and i should be old enough to write notes for myself .. but no, now i need to bug the doc .. so i wrote the note, all he has to do is sign it
"please excuse Pam from jury duty next month because of her cancer treatment" .. its so close to the notes i used to write to excuse my daughter from school .. i guess life does have a way of coming full circle eh lol
i don't know how i feel about the possibility of not having chemo today .. its not that i like chemo .. in fact when people ask me now if i'm allergic to anything i always respond that i'm allergic to chemotherapy .. but at least i knew what the plan was for today .. i like having plans, they bring me comfort .. having the treatment all up in the air, still being a guinea pig trying out new drugs .. eh .. not my cup of tea
i was shocked to see no visible change in the size of my tumor .. as sick as i got this time i thought for sure we'd have that thing running for the hills .. but i also know that using Avastin for stage IIIa lung cancer is really new .. all the studies and trials were done on stage IV .. the studies i read (or had the brain cells to actually comprehend) stated that the drug added an average of 2 months to patients with a prognosis of 10 months of life left .. but they didn't go into detail about how many treatments of avastin they had to have before the tumor responded
and just in case you picked up reading my journal mid-stream, what we're trying to do isreduce the size of the tumor in my right lung to allow for surgery .. as my cancer is staged now, the tumor size, located in my right lung (6.2 x 4.4 x 3.8 cm), the lymph node involvement (the lymph nodes on the right side and between my lungs are cancerous), the cancer type (the non aggressive type of non-small cell), and the fact that we haven't found any new cancer = cancer speak means i'm NSCLC T3N2M0 and that gives me about a 5% chance of living for 5 years .. IF i can get the tumor removed surgically, my odds increase to 25%
oh, and i'm STILL a non-smoker !! i actually went 2 weeks without using my nicotine patches, (OK, i confess i was just too sick to get out of bed to get them) but as i'm moving closer and closer to chemo, i've used the patch again for 2 days .. but i'm not gonna get down on myself, cause i'm still not smoking .. here is my newest update from quitnet . com ..
Your Quit Date is:Friday, June 24, 2005 at 6:30:00 PM
Time Smoke-Free:111 days, 12 hours, 17 minutes and 28 seconds
Cigarettes NOT smoked:2230
Lifetime Saved:17 days
Money Saved:$392.00
i'll take those precious 17 days thank you :)
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