Monday, September 2, 2019

Update ... Still Kicking :)

Hi all,

I thought I would drop by ... mainly because some spammer found the site and loaded it up on posts I needed to delete ... but, while I'm here, how about an update?

At the beginning of 2019, I was fortunate enough to get to go to Israel! Oh, what a wonderful 9-day trip that was!!! I made forever memories, that's for sure. I sure do want to go back one of these days. It was incredible!!

Here's hope for you! I went with a friend who was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer at about the same time as I was. My mom thought it was a trip just for lung cancer survivors, but truthfully, to my knowledge, we were the only two on the trip who had lung cancer in common. What a joy it was for the two of us to thumb our noses at lung cancer and go to the land where our Savior lived, walked, and taught, died, and rose again!

I typically travel a lot doing lung cancer awareness activities but 2019 has not been a year of such adventures. Besides going to Israel, I've mostly just stayed at home this year.

That's been okay because I have gotten very, VERY involved in my church and in Bible studies. There wouldn't be much time to do very much traveling and keep up with my studies, though I do still hope to continue spreading knowledge about lung cancer.

I write blogs for LungCancer.net. I'd love for you to read them. They're mostly along the same lines as these - usually focused on finding joy in living, despite a lung cancer diagnosis. I'm surely happy I didn't believe my first oncologist's prognosis of 4 months and just quit living ... think of all of the wasted time...

I guess the biggest cancer-related news I have is that I am no longer in treatment! This was a somewhat scary move because I've never been fortunate enough to have my tumors go away. They're still in my lungs - stable, but there.

Nevertheless, my doctor and I decided that it was time for me to take a break from immunotherapy after being on it continuously since July or August 2013. I had developed a small rash that was probably a result of the treatment ... and besides, I'd just been on it for a long time. Might as well see if my body has learned anything from years of training it to recognize what lung cancer cells look like!

So far, I've had one scan since quitting treatment. At least as far as we can tell, my body is doing its job and everything remains stable. Yay!

I'm enjoying not going to the doctor so often, though I had already switched to just going once a month. For years, I went every two weeks.

Well, I'll try to come back and post an update here from time to time. There's always HopeandSurvive.com, too. I don't update there very often either, but more often than here. Hope to see you there ... or here ... or on LungCancer.net!

Thanks for stopping by!