Staying the course

I am astounded and incredibly grateful for the care and compassion I’ve received from both Abbott and Mayo. I ended up getting two appointments with Mayo this week. Thursday, I met with the medical oncologists for an hour and a half, and Friday, I met with their radiologist for an hour. I really appreciated that they spent so much time with me and answered all my many questions. 

In both appointments, the doctors felt strongly that my treatments should be continued with the intent to cure me. This is HUGE because the traditional standard of care for stage IV patients is to only treat symptoms and contain the spread of cancer. The focus for stage IV treatment is primarily on quality of life and not a cure. The doctor said “curative approach” so many times while talking about my recommended treatment that I started to cry. I’d been spending the last three weeks trying to temper my hope. I felt like I had already been blindsided once by the change in diagnosis, so I was preparing myself for more bad news. I wasn’t ready to hear “curative approach” over and over and over so emphatically. 

So, the recommended plan is to stay the course of my original treatment plan, with a few tweaks. I’ll continue with the same chemo therapy for at least six rounds. The goal for chemo is get a complete response (no evidence of cancer), so I may need additional rounds to get there now.  Then surgery and radiation would be used to remove and kill any sneaky cancer cells that could be hiding out undetected. A new addition to my treatment is SBRT.  This is highly focused, stronger radiation that will be used to target the spot of cancer on my sacrum. After surgery and radiation, I’ll continue with targeted therapies and hormone therapies. I’ll likely be on those for the rest of my life because of my stage IV diagnosis. 

Monday, December 7th, I go into meet with my oncologist and have my second round of chemo. Mayo is sending all of their recommendations to her, and I will have time to go over them with her before my infusion. I don’t know if she would have come up with a different treatment recommendation, but from my time with her so far, I fully expect that she’ll follow the Mayo recommendation. 

This felt like a big hurtle to get through. Just to know that my cancer can be cured is amazing; even if they don’t want to call it “cured” because I’m stage IV. As long as there’s no cancer in my body I’ll take it! 

How to pray: 

Pray for my infusion Monday and my talk with my oncologist. That both would go well and that I would continue to have minimal side effects to the chemo. I felt very lucky to be feeling so good through the first round. 

Pray that covid numbers would go down. Our first week of virtual school was good, but still kind of rough. It’s only going to get harder as I continue with chemo and get more fatigued. It would be so amazing to get the kids back into school. I’m also getting more concerned about all illness while I’m immunocompromised. Plus, I think we’re all just so sick of social distancing, right? 

Pray for us to remain hopeful throughout this whole grueling process. This was great news we got from Mayo this week, but I don’t want my hope to be placed only on doctors and treatments. I want my hope to be firmly anchored in God because treatments can fail, but He never does.