lunhs cancer

Knowledge is power. This belief has driven how I respond to stressful situations throughout my life. When I was pregnant with our first child I took every class I could find, read stacks of books, and watched many hours of birth videos (thanks to my midwife sister). I focused. I studied. I prepared. When I found out that our second pregnancy was twins, I read books and asked questions of every twin I knew. As the pregnancy progressed and took a complicated turn, we were told that the girls may be born severely premature and if they survived they would face a lifetime of challenges. In response, I started reading about raising children with special needs. I subscribed to blogs written by some amazing families with special children. I got ready for every possible scenario. I focused. I studied. I prepared. When I was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer, I dove into the research and tried to learn everything I could about this disease. Actually, that's not quite true. For the first...

As I hope you know by now, it is Lung Cancer Awareness month, and the members of the LC community have been working our lungs out (see what I did there?) to educate and raise awareness about this horrible disease. A heartfelt thank you to my friends and family who have put up with me going on (and on and on...) about lung cancer awareness. But it means a lot to me. Obviously. During this week, this week of thankfulness, 3,000 people in my community will die from this ignored, underfunded, misunderstood, and stigmatized disease.  3,000 people. In this week of Thanksgiving I am constantly reminded of just how freakin' lucky I am to still be around today. I can breathe. I can speak. I can write. Too many people in my community are no longer able to do so. I speak out for myself and on behalf of those who no longer can. I keep talking about it, because so far I am not one of the 3,000. I keep advocating because I still can . If not me, then who? As part of the effort to educate and rai...

All is well in scanville! I've just passed my one year mark on the wonder drug Xalkori, and now I can breathe (relatively) easy until my next scan in three months. Speaking of breathing, here is one of my favorite lung cancer infographics.  At 3 pm EST today I will be participating in the WEGO Health Activist Twitter Chat (#hachat), which today is focused on lung cancer. Lung cancer bloggers Linnea Duff (@1111linno) and Samathan Mixon (@mixon_samantha) will also be participating, and my fellow ROS1er Janet Freeman-Daily will be guest hosting. We will be addressing these questions: Q1: Why do you share your lung cancer journey online? What motivates you to write a post? Q2: What kind of info do mbrs of online lung cancer community want? What messages do you try to convey? Q3: On which social media sites do you share lung cancer info? How do you choose what info to share on different sites? Q4: How/where do you find content about lung cancer that you want to share? What makes cont...

"Security is mostly a superstition." - Helen Keller I like reason and facts. I question everything, and always want to see evidence. I think I am a pretty sensible, level-headed person. And yet.... I wear the same socks for each CT scan. I wear my favorite shirt for each appointment where I get scan results. I wear two "charmed" necklaces every day. And I have saved every empty bottle of my cancer drug Xalkori. Saving my first bottle of Xalkori didn't seem so strange, since it was such a momentous occasion when we found my driver mutation and I started taking this magic medicine. And then I kept the second bottle so the first wouldn't feel lonely, and by the time I got the third bottle I couldn't bring myself to throw that one away because the medicine was working so well. So now here we are, a year later, and I have over a dozen bottles cluttering up the shelf. Ridiculous, yes, but that totally irrational part of me thinks that maybe if I get rid of th...

It is one of the most feared diseases, but what do you really know?