lunhs cancer

I've had a ringside seat to the evolution of cancer care. The first time I heard the heart-dropping, stomach-churning, breath-stealing words, "you have cancer," I was 14 years old. The second time I heard them, I was 37. The first time, a chronic ache in my shoulder turned out to be bone cancer. The second time, a chronic cough turned out to be metastatic lung cancer. When I was a teenager undergoing chemotherapy for osteosarcoma, I never really thought I was going to die. Me and my teen cancer comrades in the hospital went through hell together. But I na�vely thought we would all get better and go home again one day. I have seen cancer through an adolescent's eyes, and I have seen it through the eyes of a mom with three small children. I was a busy mom, working, going to grad school, and raising our four-year-old son and two-year-old twin daughters. I was tired all the time, but who wouldn't be? And I had a string of chest colds that I just couldn't shake. Or...

An interview with Mark Maynard, in which I discuss beer, cancer, Yes And, life choices, improv, and facing challenges head on. Pointless Brewery & Theatre to explore the intersection of brewing and improv

My port had stopped working, so they needed to start an I.V. The first nurse had blown two veins and had called in a replacement who was on her way to blowing a third. In the grand scheme of things, a few needle pokes were nothing. I had been through worse before, and there would be much harder days ahead. But in that moment, it was too much. In that moment, the months of treatment, the endless hospitalization, the constant nausea, and the helplessness were completely overwhelming.  I burst out crying. I can't do this anymore. My sister, who had been sitting in the chair next to my hospital bed, stood up and walked over to me. She cracked a smile. "Remember that day when we were little kids and we were swimming at the lake, playing Jaws?" I stopped crying and looked at her, confused. She went on to recount in exquisite detail a day years earlier when we had been swimming and had gotten our legs stuck in the weeds and muck at the bottom of the lake and I had thought that a...

Cancer?!? This can't be happening. What did I do to deserve this? Am I being Punked? Is this my fault? This isn't real. Why me? Cancer. The Big C. The malady that once was only spoken about in whispers. The Voldemort of diseases. With so much fear surrounding this diagnosis, is it any wonder we end up asking, " Why me? " Why does a 14 year old vegetarian get bone cancer ? Why does a 37 year old non-smoking mom of three little ones get lung cancer ? Why would both patients be the same person? ~~~ When I was diagnosed with lung cancer, the first person we contacted (after my parents) was my pediatric oncologist . Could this be a very delayed recurrence of my osteosarcoma? Was this caused by treatment for my first cancer? Is there something about ME that explains how I got two cancers before the age of 40? A biopsy answered the first question. No, this was adenocarcinoma of the lung. A totally different cancer than my childhood osteosarcoma. My pediatric oncologist conf...

One of the things I love about reading blogs is their immediacy. They are typically written in a moment of heightened emotion, in response to a life event. They are raw. In my new adventure blogging for CURE magazine, I am going back to the beginning of my cancer journey to catch those readers up to where I am now. I am able to reflect on moments that were too intense at the time to fully process. In my first post , I talked about the terrible moment in May of 2013 when I was diagnosed with lung cancer. The overwhelming emotion at that time was shock. I felt frozen and unable to think clearly. Looking back now, I can attempt to explain what it felt like, hopefully reaching out my hand from the shore, helping others navigate that awful fog. I realized that I couldn't talk about my current adventure with cancer without revisiting the first time, twenty some years ago when I had childhood osteosarcoma. So here is a glimpse at the early days of diagnosis, the first time around. You Hav...

I was jolted awake by Michael Stipe serenading me with "It's The End Of The World As We Know It" and immediately remembered my sister telling me she had been listening to that song some 20+ years ago when our mom called to tell her I had been diagnosed with childhood bone cancer. Really poor song choice for my alarm this morning, a day when I was waiting for scan results. Two years ago today I had just returned from the AATE conference, where I had met all sorts of impressive folks, the leaders in the field of Theatre for Young Audiences, and had received an award as one of the up-and-comers. And today I spent the day at the cancer center. The results of my scans were mixed. The lungs look stable with a bit of shrinkage on the remaining spots (yay!) and the brain scan was clear (big yay!). The questionable area was my kidneys. There might be something suspicious on them, but they consulted with several radiologist and they couldn't agree if they were rea...

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 ...

Cancer is forcing me to learn a whole new kind of patience. Though I am starting to feel fairly decent on my new meds, my stomach is still unpredictable, and I don't have the energy I used to have. In some ways, because I feel close to normal it is all the more frustrating to face my limitations. I can't multi-task as seamlessly as I used to, which I attribute to the powerful medicines that have been bombarding my body for the past 6 months. I find myself getting overwhelmed when I'm trying to follow several things at once, whereas I used to thrive in these situations. Janet of Gray Connections wrote a lovely piece about how this "chemobrain" side effect has helped her to empathize with people who face various challenges. (Janet is also a ROS1+ stage IV lung cancer fighter, and a lovely and brilliant lady.) This experience is forcing me (sometimes dragging me kicking and screaming) to become more patient with myself and accept that things may need to move at a sl...

23 years ago today, at age 14, I was diagnosed with osteogenic sarcoma of the right humerus. It is strange that now I have to refer to that as "the first time I had cancer." I recall driving to the biopsy early that October morning, when the first fingers of Minnesota winter were really starting to grip the state, covering everything with frost and making the air harsh and brisk. I looked out the window and thought to myself, quite dramatically, "thus begins the winter of my life." The doctors very strongly suspected that the biopsy would come back positive for cancer, and told me they would be able to tell by looking at the specimen for just a moment under a microscope, so the plan was to keep me under anesthetic and put in my port once they confirmed it was positive. I remember waking up after surgery and feeling for my new port. It was there, so I knew my answer. "Here we go." I fell back into my groggy slumber. What followed were 11 of the hardest mont...

I am realizing that I have been, perhaps, too delicate in describing my health situation. People keep asking me questions that indicate that I need to be more blunt about the current state of affairs.  So here are the bold facts, no holds barred: I have Stage 4, metastatic adenocarcinoma, a non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). It is incurable, and considered terminal with an average life expectancy of eight months. Since there is no cure, there is no end date to the treatment.  I will continue to have chemo (or other treatments) for the rest of my life. There is no plan to do surgery since the cancer has already spread throughout my body, making removing it from my lung pointless according to current thinking on the subject. As of my last CT scan, my current chemo regiment appears to be working. This is a great thing, but it is by no means permanent. The tricky thing with cancer is that is can mutate and become resistant to the chemo at any time.  I am currently on a ...