Happy Anniversary
It is with bitter sweet apprehension that I celebrate today. One year ago, today, was (essentially) diagnosed with pancreas cancer. Despite my beliefs to the contrary, here it is one year later and I’m (STILL) Not Dead Yet! This has been a tumultous ride for me and, though I have said it several times before, I want to make sure you all understand just how important and helpful it is to me that you have joined me on this trek.
I don’t blog all that much anymore (though, as I have previously stated, I keep having plans to pick that up again and just blog about me and my life (rather than me dealing with cancer — though, in many ways, they are one in the same). When I logged on today, however, I was tickled to see that people are still reading and leaving comments; it made me smile (thank you Adele and Michele and Sherri and Debra and…and…and…).
It’s funny; I’m not sure if I am imagining this or not, but it seems the last several days I have said the following phrase to people many times: “The nice thing about pancreas cancer…” Usually, it has been in the context of people telling me I look good / don’t look sick. Essentially, I tell folks that one of the nice things about pancreas cancer is that it doesn’t really impact someone externaly until it gets pretty advanced; even while I was going through chemo and radiation (before my surgery), I was still able to get around pretty okay and stay active. I expect that should the tumors come back, I will continue that effort.
I guess I’ve been lucky that the majority of my “problems” associated with pancreas cancer have been treatment related: being nauseaus after chemo, my digestive quirks (a result of my “replumbing” surgery). Today, I feel good. This is a good thing!
For those of you who have asked (or have wondered), my father was discharged from the hospital in the Bahamas on Tuesday and traveled back to the U.S. on Wednesday. He will be following up with his doctors shortly, but for now, he feels better (of course, when he was taken off the cruise ship, he was hypertensive and had great difficulty breathing — in retrospect it would be hard to feel worse)!
One thing that many people have commented about recently is my continued hair growth. As I mentioned earlier this month, my hair has been growing much more quickly in the since I’ve been off chemo. It’s amazing, you stop taking medicine designed to slow fast cell growth and guess what, among other things, your hair grows faster. For the first time in many, many, many months, I think I actually need to have a haircut.
Again, thank you for your love and support!
Merle