Living with Cancer

Wow, this article on FOX today absolutely stopped me in my tracks.

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2012/01/26/newer-stronger-chemo/?intcmp=features

I can relate completely with this article.  It discusses exactly how I feel.  Replace breast cancer with colon cancer, 10 years with 9 years and Abraxane with my milder Camptosar and you have me.

I’ve had the same worry, dealt with the same depression, made the same deal with the “universe”.  I too face so few days of feeling well enough to function, with a quality of life that is pretty severely low.  So desperately have I hoped for some other way to attack my disease that I’ve wept and felt the despair of knowing my current regimen is the BEST I can hope for – it only gets worse from here if the current treatment doesn’t succeed.  I have read the technical descriptions of how the medicines I take work, and then wondered how I even function as well as I do after understanding what it is doing to my body.  Damaging DNA and RNA and destroying a cell’s ability to divide?  If that doesn’t sound like slow death I don’t know what does.  And that’s the treatment, not the disease!

I’ve faced the hope, anticipation and dejection of multiple treatments and surgeries, each of which offered a possibility of remission and each of which failed.  I see the body in the mirror that even my oncologist jokes “looks like a roadmap” from all the scars on the abdomen.

Yes, I’ve lost the hair, but let’s face it – it was going anyway and it’s not nearly the issue for the guys that it is for the girls.  At least on that front I can actually smile about it, and it’s really only that I have next to no eyebrows that bugs me because it makes me look creepy.  Er…creepier.

Anyway, it’s not that frequently that I read something shared from the heart that I can relate to so completely that I felt it could have been written about me.  That’s what this article is.  It hits very close to home.