lunhs cancer

I love summer in Ann Arbor. The weather finally turns warm, I plan the garden, festival season kicks off, and all my favorite annual events roll around again. This time of year is now also a minefield of poignant memories. I remember counting down the days last year until the end of my semester, willing myself to make it through that last final, that last presentation, and that last tour performance. I was not overwhelmed by the workload - it was a lot, but I thrived in that environment - for some reason, though, I was totally and utterly exhausted. I had been fighting off recurring chest colds for months, and I just couldn't get ahead of them. I remember giving my research project presentation and having to stop and catch my breath. Just standing and talking had me winded. I slept for a week after exams, and somehow it didn't feel any better.... Today we drove past Picnic Pops, an annual outdoor festival of local high school and junior high bands, and I said to Jason, "Oh...

Scan results today, and the verdict is... ...drumroll, please... More shrinkage! All that is left is a tiny spot in my left lung, 7x13 mm. Amazing! Thank you Xalkori, thank you Pfizer, thank you researchers for this miracle medicine! I understand why another Xalkori patient made a music video about her love of this drug. Thank you to all the wonderful people sending their love and support our way. I am truly one lucky gal. Also, this blog was named one of the best lung cancer blogs of 2014 ! As I said to my fellow bloggers in the list, let's do it again in 2015.  

I've been reading a book as research for a wonderfully terrifying endeavor Jason and I are working on* and I came across a section that talks about the poor odds of a small business succeeding. *More on this soon, I promise! There is lots of good stuff a-brewing. I couldn't help but chuckle. That's supposed to scare me? You wanna talk to me about long odds? So I did some digging. (Okay, googling.) For every 10,000 kids in the US, 1 or 2 will be diagnosed with cancer each year. That's a 0.01-0.02% chance. Let's narrow it down to osteosarcoma, my childhood cancer. In the US, there are about 5.6 diagnoses per million people each year. That's a 0.00056% chance. About 2 out of 10,000 people will be diagnosed with lung cancer before the age of 40. That's a 0.02% chance. Now recall that I have a rare driving mutation, ROS1 , that occurs in about 1-2% of non-small cell lung cancer. Then there are the gulp-worthy stats about lung cancer survival times, and I have ...