It’s been quite a week for me but I wanted to drop in and say, “Hello!” It’s been a tiny bit since I gave you a health update. I was going to wait until later this week but I’m in a writing mood. It’s not even 7am this Sunday and I’m up. My internal alarm clock has me up early every day. I’m unsure if it’s because I work in the morning and that’s when I have the most energy or what… but it makes it hard to “sleep in.” Luckily, a positive to an early morning is the pink sky I’m staring at as the sun rises to signal a new day. I’m grateful at this moment. I have a couple candles lit. I’m in my comfy bed. I made my first cup of coffee in a year! I’ve been Uber Eating DD or Starbucks for a few weeks. I feel like I’m wasting money and was like “Jaz! make your coffee!” It actually doesn’t taste bad. Yes. My taste is still really off.
Anyhoo, back to my update. I did have some scans this month. It was another mixed bag but overall good. My brain mets are stable. There is nothing new and nothing grew. The lesions either shrunk, don’t show up on the scan, or stayed the same. Yay! The lesions in the rest of my body either stayed the same or don’t show up on scans! Yay! However, an area in my left lung grew… a bit. It grew on the last scan too. We were just monitoring it to see if three months of more chemo would shrink it or stabilize it. It did neither. So, my oncologist was like, “Not sure. It could be cancer. It is more likely an infection. I just don’t know. I’m sending you to a lung doctor.”
This past Tuesday I met the lung doctor. I was really hoping she’d say, “We’ll just monitor it. It looks like an infection.” Instead she said, “I have no clue what it is. It could be infection or it could be cancer.” She said I needed a lung biopsy. Insert my internal eye roll I gave here. I’ve had biopsies on my lymph nodes and breast. They’re not the most comfortable but they’re doable and pretty simple. The lung… yeah. The idea of someone taking a needle and puncturing my lung freaked me a bit. You gotta do what you gotta do though. Knowledge is power. Without it you can’t crush the cancer. I had a looooong day at the hospital, with my parents, and underwent the biopsy. They had me on my stomach and hit the lung from my back. This was not comfortable and I was in pain. The last thing I remember was me telling them, “My neck and head are killing me from this position you have me in.” I remember feeling a stabbing pain in my back. I assume it was the biopsy needle going into me. I don’t remember anything else until waking up in some pain. I was fearful my lung had collapsed as that is the primary concern when you have a lung biopsy. It hadn’t! Yay! So… we are waiting. I will find out this week what the biopsy results are. Is it cancer? If so that means we change chemo… again! I’m hoping for the infection. That sounds a lot easier to treat and more likely the case. So, y’all please put out “infection” vibes into the universe. It doesn’t help I had a dream last night that it came back as cancer. That’s the only part of the dream I remember. I know there was more to it. Of course that’s the part I remember!
As you go on with your day today… remember this. It’s a new day. You are blessed with it. Do something that brings you joy. As the season changes please remember to rest. I have been all weekend. Rest is a gift of gratitude to my body for keeping me alive. For all I’ve put it through. I once measured a good day with how much I got done. How productive I was. I still do… in a way. However, now I measure it more in how present I was. Did I take in that sunrise. Did I enjoy that cup of coffee… the smell of a sweet burning candle… my ability to move. I look out the window at the golden glow of the sun. It is still rising. Just like me. Just like you. We all rise as we start a new day. Glow on.
