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Never Waste a Good Day

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  Never Waste a Good Day [Typical view when driving, from the first warm day in Spring until the last warm day in Fall] [Jeep Wrangler = Most Enjoyed Vehicle I’ve Ever Had] [Good Day = Sunny and >65 degrees] High Level Process Update It’s been a while since the last updated, and it seems like a lot has happened. Long story short, the cancer has spread to some new places, I’ve had radiation on some places, and I’ve tried some new drugs that generally haven’t worked very well.  A few more details for those of you who just want the highlights of my medical condition, and don’t really get into the other 200 paragraphs: The lung tumors are still growing, and now I have one in every lobe of both lungs; I still have lesions in the liver; I also have a lesion on the left front of my pubic bone; and other miscellaneous areas like abdominal lymph nodes, etc. The next step is radiation on the largest tumor in my left lung, which should start in the first week of January. The goal is t...
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  High Level Process Update I’m sorry so much time has passed since I last wrote, but here is a short summary: Systemic treatment is ongoing and has been fairly effective, but not enough to prevent slow and steady disease progression. As an indicator of cancerous activity, the CEA blood test has trended from 3 to 13 over the past year. Not extremely bad, but not good enough. Efforts to surgically remove tumors in the liver and lungs went well, but new ones have grown back in their places according to PET scans, which are in agreement with CEA trends. My oncologist’s interpretation is that this is par for the course for stage IV. We can try going back and forth between pulling “weeds” and using “herbicide” (metaphor for surgery and chemotherapy). But ultimately we don’t have a good enough ways to kill all the “seeds,” and we can only pull "weeds" so many times without impairing function of critical organs (lungs, liver). He told me from the beginning that he wasn't expecti...
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