Four years ago today, my entire world collapsed around me as I sobbed and screamed from a hospital bed in the middle of an ER as a doctor with a forlorn look on his face delivered the news that I had a massive tumor that had taken over my right kidney. I didn’t understand then… Continue reading Quatre
It’s been 3 years and six months since I started Cabometyx. The medication that not only saved my life, but gave me time I had no right to expect or deserve, if you asked papillary renal cell carcinoma. I joined the PAPMET clinical trial as one of its very first patients, and was randomly assigned… Continue reading Turn The Page
Time. The one thing we never have enough of. The thing that flies by so quickly. The thing we don’t appreciate enough. I stand and look around my life, and I don’t know how time has passed so fast. Somehow, my kids aren’t toddlers anymore; they’re halfway through high school. Somehow, it’s been ten years… Continue reading 6 Months Later
Well, we’re here. I didn’t expect to see three years since my diagnosis, much less to see three years with yet another (thank God, literally) clean scan behind me. Three years ago, I felt the walls closing in around me. I summoned up a strength I didn’t realize I possessed. I did not go gently… Continue reading trois
Every 3 months, it’s the same routine. Get the IV started. Flush the saline in, giving that nauseating, mildly reminiscent smell through my bones of a salty day on the Gulf. Surrender myself on the table again, offering my body up to the God of Science Experiments. Stare at the ceiling, contemplating the results that… Continue reading Carry On Breathing
In August 2005, as I was about to start college at Loyola University in New Orleans, a little thunderstorm made its way through the city and wreaked havoc on my life. You may have heard of it – Hurricane Katrina. For years after Katrina, I looked at many things in my life as pre-K and… Continue reading Life Post-Hurricane
Year two. Still standing. Still here. Back to my new normal so much, I only stopped and thought to myself a few times, “Wow. Just think where I was two years ago today.” Another notch in the belt. Dr. V and my research nurse were both horrified and laughing when I told them today was… Continue reading Deux.
I made a scary decision this week. OK, that’s being a little trivial. I’ve made far scarier decisions in the past 22 months, you know, like treatment plans and surgery decisions and writing out my will and my wishes for what I’d want if the worst happened. So yeah, nothing on that scale, by far.… Continue reading Cabo Hair, Part II
“If they say Who cares if one more light goes out? In a sky of a million stars It flickers, flickers Who cares when someone’s time runs out? If a moment is all we are We’re quicker, quicker Who cares if one more light goes out? Well I do” – Linkin Park, “One More Light”… Continue reading Survivor’s Guilt
I have dreamed of writing this post for so long that I don’t even quite know what to say. You would think I would have put more thought into this, but I didn’t want to get too far ahead of myself. I was worried if I mentally wrote it, I’d jinx myself. Hope is a… Continue reading Survivor.
