Honoring one of my Guardian Angels on my 10 Year “Cancerversary”
Lisa Goldman
by Lisa Goldman
2M ago
photo by Quinn Dumbrowski As I have mentioned previously, unlike many cancer patients, I make it a point not to mark my “cancerversaries.” The day I was diagnosed was pretty freaking terrible, and I take Deepak Chopra’s caution to heart: “If your attention is attracted to negative situations and emotions, then they will grow in your awareness.” I don’t need to grow my awareness of negative situations, I’m all full up, thankyouverymuch.  Today, however, marks 10 years, and I’ve found myself unable to divert my attention, especially because I recently lost one of the two people who were a ..read more
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Grief is Love (Update #29)
Lisa Goldman
by Lisa Goldman
4M ago
Photo by Mike Labrum on Unsplash Traditional Chinese Medicine (“TCM”) associates the lungs with grief, so when too much grief is present, it can weaken the lungs. I don’t necessarily give this philosophy a ton of credence, but I nevertheless worry about how experiencing grief can undermine my health. This is obviously a bit of a challenge, as grief is fairly unavoidable when I spend so much of my time around terminal cancer patients. I have tried to train myself to confront grief when it arises, so that I can metabolize and release it as quickly as possible. Suppressing grief feels dangerous ..read more
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LCAM 2023 FUNdraiser – Join me for a Zentangle class!
Lisa Goldman
by Lisa Goldman
4M ago
Oh wow, it’s already mid-November — I’m a bit tardy to welcome you to Lung Cancer Awareness Month! The world feels especially bleak these days, and  it’s incumbent on each of us to contribute light where we can. So, it’s in that spirit that I am offering up my annual Zentangle class fundraiser for lung cancer research. For the fundraiser I will be teaching a simple Zentangle class. I put the emphasis on simple because I really want this class to be as relaxing and meditative as possible — who couldn’t use a bit more of that in their life? (I know I could.) We will create a “monotangle” ti ..read more
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Bracing for Life (Update #28)
Lisa Goldman
by Lisa Goldman
9M ago
Photo by Carrie I got braces a couple weeks ago. I still can’t quite wrap my head around it.  I’ve known I needed them for years. I was in the midst of treatment for TMJ when I got diagnosed with lung cancer and my TMJ doc dropped me like a hot potato, figuring I was a goner. It was hard to disagree, so I gave up on the treatment. It seemed most practical to just limp along with my ancient nightguard until I was buried with it. How could I think of investing the time and money into correcting such a problem when I might only have months to live?  I couldn’t. For many years, facing ..read more
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Cancer Stages
Lisa Goldman
by Lisa Goldman
11M ago
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
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Update 27: Dream Big
Lisa Goldman
by Lisa Goldman
11M ago
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
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Update 26: Envy (and an LCAM FUNdraiser announcement!)
Lisa Goldman
by Lisa Goldman
1y ago
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
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NED – I’m Not That Into Him (Update #25)
Lisa Goldman
by Lisa Goldman
2y ago
  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
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The Not Really Terminal Terminal Patient Put in the Wrong Terminal
Lisa Goldman
by Lisa Goldman
2y ago
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
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Linnea Olsen, Light Bearer: May her Memory be for a Blessing
Lisa Goldman
by Lisa Goldman
2y ago
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
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