That Makes Six

 

Six years ago on November 9, I was driving home from my community college teaching job, when I got a phone call from a young pulmonologist. I'd sat with him in his clinic a few days prior, looking together at a suspicious CT scan of my chest. Worried, he'd summoned a pathologist to biopsy a small lump in my neck, the telltale sign that had gotten me referred to him. On the call, I could tell from his tone of voice that the biopsy findings weren't good, so I pulled to the side of the interstate to brace for bad news and heard him say "adenocarcinoma, a lung cancer."

And that was it. A couple of weeks later, I walked into an oncology clinic and have been a cancer patient ever since.  I've had tons of CT scans, MRIs, and PET scans, and a couple more biopsies. I've had targeted therapy, traditional infusion chemotherapy, radiation (including scary brain radiation). I've chronicled the side-effects (weight gain, neuropathy, aphasia, memory loss), and the emotional toll (depression, anger, grief).  I feel like I went shopping at the cancer boutique and got myself one of everything. I came to know quite a lot about the particular disease I have (ROS+ adenocarcinoma), and all kinds of factoids about lung cancers (lung cancer is not one disease, but many), and about the lack of research funding made available to study this complicated collection of diseases.

What I didn't know then, though, was that I'd be writing this post six years down the line. Because, well, obvs, metastatic lung cancer is a killer. But so far, all the treatments, and my continued daily treatment with targeted therapy (lorlatinib) has kept the cancer in check. For now. Always, that is the truth. For now. There is no cure, but there is treatment. For now. On the sixth anniversary of diagnosis. 

And this treatment works for some people some of the time. Sometimes for a little while. Sometimes for a long while, long enough that you could end up dying of something else. Sometimes if your treatment stops working, there's another waiting in a test-tube in a great research center. Perhaps it keeps your disease in check for another six years. By then, you might be old, officially! Or maybe not. Maybe some time, you won't have any treatment options left.

Anniversaries are for remembering what came before. And before the before. After the diagnosis, I viewed my life in two distinct portions, BC and AC (before cancer diagnosis and after cancer diagnosis), believing that my world had shifted entirely, that AC had apocalyptic dimensions. But six years down the line, with a whole lot of living with the disease, that line has blurred. I haven't been living in apocalypse land, despite the ick of treatments and adverse affects. I've just been muddling through an average life like most everyone else. The best science and all the poetry in the world assure me that I won't live forever, that this disease or another one or some other fate lies in wait to take me down. But in the meantime, I'm going to keep counting, gratefully...one, two, three, four, five, six...