Sometimes - you don’t realize how much something hurts until you touch it. Or until you know it’s there. The trail failed. 17% progression in tracked lesions ... under the 20% threshold but alas ... 2 new spots appeared in my liver, a new spot on my psoas muscle and that weird lump on the back of my mid-right rib cage ... cancer too. Those new spots mean I’m out. The docs at MDA delivered the ..read more

Hi. It's been forever - I know. And I'm sorry. 3 months is a long time when you've been counting time like I have been. And yet it goes by much faster than I'd like it to. In a blink it feels like Christmas is over and the new year is only a couple days away - which is actually what's true. Christmas is over and New Year's is literally 2 days from now. In the last 3 months - I've managed to ..read more

I got an update from NIH today about that TIL trial I’m in. I'm out. They didn't find anything they could work with, and nothing they could artificially modify to work with either. The trial is over for me. It also shuts the doors to any kind of vaccine trial or anything new they are rolling out as well ... since finding reactivity was the starting block for all of that.  I’ve been scared and ..read more

It starts the same way every time. I run my hands through my hair and suddenly there's a lot more than "just shedding" wrapped in my fingers. It's a knowing when you see it in your hands. A heaviness that settles in your chest - with a sigh of resignation. You know what's coming, what you need to do to get there ... and yet you still hold out hope that maybe ... just maybe ... you're one of the ..read more

So I know it's been a couple months since I last posted. And I know my last post was a real drag. I'm sorry about that. A lot of people told me it made them cry. It made me cry too. In general however - my feelings about it all haven't really changed from that last post unfortunately. I still feel like I'm dying. But what has changed is I've been there and back to the National Institute of ..read more

I'm starting to believe that I'm dying. Sooner rather than later. When the doctor first told me that the cancer was present in my neck ... and then at subsequent appointments we covered the other areas of disease spread - bones, lymph nodes in my chest, my lung, my liver ... my brain. My oncologist then told me that we should expect that in 3-5 years this disease will claim me. That was in ..read more

"Le sigh" ... as one of my co-workers says. It always cracks me up when I see it too. I don't know why, but I'll take the smiles it brings all the same. So yep - you inferred correctly - I'm still working. I'm still going about my life in every normal way possible - wife, mom, employee, daughter, sister, friend - awesomeness. We're coming up on two years here pretty soon and thus far, adding ..read more

So - it's October and Halloween is seriously on the horizon. It's also been 4.5 months since my last update and I'm sorry! But, as the title suggests - we've been busy living "in-between" - in-between treatments, in-between appointments, in-between the hours sometimes. It all depends on what's going on that particular day. But lately - it's been in-between appointments - which is good. It means ..read more

So here we are, 4 weeks into the new treatment of weekly taxol, herceptin and perjeta. It's been an interesting 4 weeks thus far. Week 1, I came down with a fever of 101.5 and Mike had to do a late night run to the pharmacy for antibiotics and I had to go in the next day for blood work from both my arm and my port, to make sure there wasn't an infection in the part itself. I also had to do chest ..read more

Remember back in January this year when I wrote about coming up on my 1 year mark, I was having a particularly challenging morning already and then I logged into work and the first URL I saw in the folder list was "small-cells-big-changes?" I felt like my mind was going to burst and that the Universe was trying to tell me something. Well ... it's been 4 months since then. And do you know what ..read more