So…. I had planned to write this post last night, but fatigue got the best of me (it is amazing how your stamina changes after lots of treatment). So my blog went live on Tuesday night then almost immediately, I started to receive feedback. I was so excited in my hyper super excited state (many may argue I am always in this state), I began reading messages to my husband. I had shown him my layout before going live, and had encouraged him to read it, but he seemed disinterested. I honestly wondered if my posts would be too much for him to read. This is not an easy adventure…. Well, I was wrong and my reading of responses to him must have made him excited, because on Wednesday morning as he was laying in bed half asleep, he asked how do I find your blog….
I thought he was forwarding it to someone, maybe sending it to his Mother, but no he was reading it and really reading it. After we got the kids off to school, he started to show me my spelling and grammar mistakes. I fixed them all. At this point in my head I was thinking if you would have read this when I tried to show it to you before I published the site, I wouldn’t have made typos…. I hate typos. But then, he told me to look at my About Me section and said something to the effect of- you haven’t been diagnosed with Pancreatic High Grade Neuroendocrine Cancer for 28 months. You aren’t telling the whole story, you are simplifying it. Then he encouraged me to write the whole story of my diagnosis because the simplicity of my current diagnosis does not explain the adventure we went on for the first 19-20 months where despite a couple biopsies, tons of pathological tests, scans, lab work, genetic tumor tests, 2 major cancer centers and many doctors no one could tell us definitively what type of cancer I had nor where it started. All we know definitively was that it was small cell, very aggressive, that my liver at initial diagnosis was 60-80% compromised and the odds were stacked against us. A third biopsy in the summer of 2018 (after the cancer grew and spread), confirmed the high grade neuroendocrine, and then the pancreatic primary site was only deduced when I visited a 3rd major cancer center in December 2018. I will post more in detail about this in a later post. It has been an adventure where unknowns have been more common than knowns, where I was lucky enough to have a pioneer in the cancer world find chemo that worked for me. I cannot wait to tell you about him.
My husband wants me to share the details- good, bad, and giggle worthy of the whole adventure. And my favorite comment just a few minutes after publishing my site was from my 21 year old (at college) who simply wrote “I am proud of you”. Words cannot express how grateful I am for my husband and kids who support me being me, bald or not. (Let’s see if he reads this before I post it, I am getting ready to hand the computer over…..) He did!!!
P.S. Thank you all for reading and commenting and most importantly for your prayers, positivity, and support. Last I looked I was at over 900 hits (I know I account for at least 40…. I check it often LOL)