It's official!

I saw my med onc yesterday and he confirmed that the pesky tumor has disappeared from the ct-scan! So as best as can be determined at this point I am NED (no evidence of disease- which just means they can't find any cancer which is about the best one can hope for) again! It's truly amazing, I'm not sure I really expected to ever be NED again. Certainly my drs. didn't give me a lot of hope towards that. But, as I told the fellow (the dr. who works with my dr. on a fellowship) yesterday at my appt., "I do cancer weird". He looked at me oddly at first and then started laughing. But it's true, nothing about my first cancer made sense, even the endo cancer was odd in how advanced it was at it's first symptom, and to have this recurrence be in one lymph node for two years and not spread and then disappear? It's definitely not following the cancer rule book. Not that there is such a thing, cancer pretty much does what it wants, but the odds are certainly not with you when you present with stage 4b cancer (my first cancer) or once you've had a recurrence (the 2nd cancer). It's kind of what's helped me keep hope through all of this, if I can be odd in bad ways, I can be odd in good ways too.

So I see the gyn onc later this month and he and the med onc will confer and decide what the plan is. For now I am continuing on Megace (the hormonal drug I've been on for the past year) and my next med onc appt. is in 4 months instead of three. The best part is that I don't have to have a scan for that appt., he said I could wait till the appt. after that. Having scans is so stressful, being able to spread them out is huge for us, not to mention less radiation exposure and not having to take steroids to avoid the allergic reaction to the contrast dye.

There is a blood marker used mostly in ovarian cancer called ca-125 that has recently started being used in endo cancer. I didn't have any ca-125 tests done in my initial diagnosis, but a year ago the med onc ordered one, and then at my last appt. ordered another one. I had this done last week, a couple days after my scan. The levels should be below 32 but a year ago they were 49 and this time 53, a negligible difference but both are still above normal. The med onc says he doesn't know if there is any significance but that we'll keep watching them so I do have to get that test done before my next visit with him. I'm curious to see what my gyn onc has to say about them. The other thing was the pelvic fluid which actually is what started this whole thing. Because of the fluid in my pelvis at my scan in 12/06 (which was spurred on by my back pain at the time) they did a PET scan which found the tumor, which they then were able to go back and find on the ct once they knew where to look. Anyway, they always said the amount of fluid was very small and they were not concerned with it, and this scan showed a decrease in the fluid, so again they are not concerned with it.

With cancer you are never 100% in the clear, but where I am now is pretty darn good and I'll take it any day! I've had so many miracles in my life, Z. being born healthy at 29 weeks when at 22 weeks the pregnancy was in serious trouble and they told me they wouldn't resuscitate if she were born then and if she did make it through the night she'd probably not make it past 24 weeks; my surviving stage 4b vulvar cancer with just chemo, which was only supposed to be palliative; and now this. But my joy is tempered by my sadness for all those who have not had such miracles, especially for my late sister Lisa who not only lost a child at three weeks old, but died from breast cancer complications when she was 41 years old. I am no more worthy or special than anyone else, I am not stronger or more positive or anything like that. I do feel that my good fortune is spread out amongst all who I care for and who care for me and I am grateful to share it.