There’s a lot of emphasis in oncology on “staging a patient.” That’s a bit of a misnomer. What the docs really mean when they refer to staging a patient is staging the cancer (how much it has spread), not the patients themselves. Doctors use staging to determine treatment protocols. We patients have a completely different staging process. The stages of being an “incurable” cancer patient are similar to the stages of grief. It seems like it’s going to be a linear process (denial -> anger -> bargaining -> depression -> acceptance), and ends up being a hall-of-mirrors where you just b ..read more

Oh, hi there. Long time, no chat. Sorry if I caused any one any concern. I know from following fellow cancer patient blogs that when they go silent, I start to worry.  So I’ll cut to the chase, Update #27: my scans in December and March continue to hold miraculously steady.  Of course, my scan results are just a piece of the good news. In some ways, the equally good news is that I haven’t been blogging because I’ve been pretty busy living. It’s been an exciting 6 months.  I turned 50 (!) in October — a milestone birthday I didn’t expect to see. It coincided with the 30th anniver ..read more

Photo by Tabu_Soro There’s a thing that happened when I got diagnosed with cancer that I only recently stopped doing. I compared myself to other cancer patients. It was a way to grasp for straws when I was standing in quicksand.  I didn’t spend a ton of time thinking about the people I was faring better than (nor, strangely, did I focus on healthy people who weren’t diagnosed at all). Instead, I often wondered and wished I could be as lucky as some others that seemed to be doing better than me: patients who had gotten diagnosed at slightly earlier “curable” stages, fellow “incurable” pa ..read more

  A couple of weeks ago, I shared with a community of fellow cancer patients that I had another round of good scans (that makes an 8+ years since I was diagnosed). Amidst all the cheers and posts of support, someone politely asked, “but are you NED?” NED is an acronym for “no evidence of disease,” and it’s the holy grail for most Stage IV cancer patients. Since “cured” is, by definition, off the table for Stage IV patients, NED seems like the next best thing. We all want NED. I have a friend who, having achieved NED after a particularly treacherous journey, threw a party featuring a blow ..read more

Have you ever gone to the airport to catch a flight to another country and you arrive at the international terminal only to discover you’re in the wrong place, apparently your international flight isn’t “international enough” to qualify for the international terminal. Or, conversely, you’re scheduled for a quick domestic trip, and randomly your flight is going out of the international terminal, and your little jet is parked next to some massive airliner headed to Singapore and you wonder how you ended up slotted here? (Both of these things have happened to me.) Sometimes, shit just doesn’t fit ..read more

L-R: Me, Linnea, Samantha, Kelly My friend Linnea Olson died today. She had lived with a Stage IV lung cancer diagnosis for over 16 years. She never achieved the holy grail of “NED” (no evidence of disease). She lived every inch of those 16+ years side-by-side with the cancer in her lungs, sometimes more prevalent than others, but never gone. Always fighting, she embraced the “warrior” and “battle” language quite literally. But somehow, along with her ferocious determination, she always spared a laugh (a fabulously contagious cackle actually), always had a twinkle in her eye. I think it’s th ..read more

My project for #InktoberTangles2021 If you’ve been following my blog for a while, I hope you already know this, but since the media continues to mostly ignore it (even though it’s the NUMBER ONE CANCER KILLER IN THE WORLD BY A FREAKING MILE – I’m not shouting, you’re shouting), here’s my annual reminder: November is Lung Cancer Awareness Month (“LCAM”)! Over the years, I’ve shared all sort of stats and info about LC – how it’s stigmatized even though it can affect anyone, how it kills twice as many women as breast cancer, how it’s wildly underfunded, etc. Instead of reiterating it all, I’ll ..read more

Photo by me, at Gamble Gardens in Palo Alto, CA. I titled this series “Cancer Patient-ing Like it’s my JOB” because I spend such a great deal of my time, energy, and resources being a cancer patient (beyond the baseline medical appointments and treatments).  In my disclaimers, I explicitly note that I attribute my longevity entirely to my targeted therapy medication and luck, and not all of the extras I go on to list in Part 1, 2, and 3. So, why then do I even bother with all of these extras? Following the logic of Carl Jung’s philosophy that “what you resist persists,” I have always fe ..read more

[This is Part #2 of a 3 part series — Part 1: Diet & Supplements – Green Juice, Birthday Cake and Lots of Pills; Part 2: Exercise – Basically a Love Letter to Peloton; Part 3: Misc. “Alternative” Items  – Oh, That’s Just Mom’s Sound Healer] PART III – Miscellaneous “Alternatives” – Oh, That’s Just Mom’s Sound Healer Please see my important disclaimers discussed in Part 1, which apply here, too. Sometimes I feel self-conscious about revealing all the other things I’m trying, as they range from mainstream enough that even some hospitals are offering them (e.g. acupunctur ..read more

[This is Part #2 of a 3 part series — Part 1: Diet & Supplements – Green Juice, Birthday Cake and Lots of Pills; Part 2: Exercise – Basically a Love Letter to Peloton; Part 3: Misc. “Alternative” Items  – Oh, That’s Just Mommy’s Sound Healer] PART II: Exercise – Basically a Love Letter to Peloton Please see my important disclaimers discussed in Part 1, which apply here, too.  Exercise has been an important part of my life for as long as I can remember. After I got sick, the inability to work up a sweat and get that endorphin high was a huge loss for me – physicall ..read more