Thursday, June 7, 2012
" Never Losing Heart and Hope, Her Journey into Healing."
Posted by Melissa | Thursday, June 7, 2012 | Category:
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June 7, 2012
After several weeks of traveling, celebrating and doctor’s appointments, I am thrilled to be back and spending time writing on my sweet blog. My deepest gratitude to Melissa Blynn for being patient with me these last few weeks as I concentrated on my health and myself. J
So much has happen since my last blog post. I celebrated two years of being diagnosed with cancer and had the awesome opportunity to speak at the RefresHER women’s conference. I visited Florida to spend time with my grandparents, Columbus to celebrate my fabulous friends wedding, San Diego to honor my cousin as she graduated from USD, Monterey to spend some time with one of my dearest friends and her sweet family and Northern California twice to see a thoracic and cardiovascular specialist about my next steps with cancer. During this time as well I was given a CT scan that came back with no evidence of metastatic disease (YEAH!) and then a PET scan that came back a week later that showed several lesions of cancer located in my abdomen and a couple lymph nodes (BOO!).
Late in March it was determined that my ca125 was beginning to slow down. It was still continuing to decrease, but not as significant as it was in the past. My doctor had expressed concern that my ca125 was still above the 100 mark, 182 to be exact, and suggested I visit a specialist in Northern California to review my lungs.
Originally when I was diagnosed with cancer and went through surgery it was discovered that cancer cells had spread to my lungs pretty rapidly. This has always been a huge concern with my oncologist, and he has paid close attention to my lungs since the beginning. Although there were no symptoms of the cancer being in my lungs, my oncologist and I determined that my lungs had to probably be the cause of the rather slow dropping ca125 because I was not having symptoms of cancer anywhere in my body.
I traveled to Northern California to see the wonderful Dr. Katske in April. My sweet friend Erin joined me at the appointment to be my support and second ear. (Thank you Erin for everything. I am forever grateful that you came to my doctor’s appointment with me.) He was very informative and also had reason to believe that there were most likely small lesions in my lungs that the CT scan I recently had did not pick up. He thoroughly looked over my HUGE file and listened as I told him everything that had happened in the past two years of cancer. I left his office with a tentative date for lung surgery in May.
I returned to Northern California in May to what I planned to be a laparoscopic lung surgery and possibly a few days in the hospital. Before going into surgery, the doctor scheduled me to go into a PET scan to identify the location of the cancer cells in the lungs the best that they could. I had the PET early on a Monday morning, and went in to see the doctor later that afternoon for the results.
Much to my surprise, and the doctors, the PET scan revealed absolutely no cancer in the lungs, or above the diaphragm for that matter. However, it was discovered that I had several lesions scattered through out my stomach and spots located in a couple lymph nodes. Both doctor and I were pretty surprised with the news, but very blessed to see that it wasn’t in the lungs, and decided it would be best if he did not do surgery.
I traveled back to Las Vegas were I saw my oncologist a few days later. He was please to see the findings of the PET scan and immediately scheduled me for surgery to remove the spots and possibly remove my colostomy on June 20th. After surgery I will have to resume chemotherapy to hopefully remove the remaining cancer cells once and for all.
Please keep my family and I in your thoughts and prayers during the next few weeks as we prepare for my surgery and recovery.
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