Good news, I'm alive! · 5:49am Jul 10th, 2019

So, at the time of my last blog I not only had cancer, but I was also suffering from pneumonia. This was the week after my first hospital visit, where they basically did a bunch of tests and gave me risky heart surgery because there was a sac full of fluid crushing it.

Shortly after I wrote that, I had to get rushed to the ER and stayed in the hospital for about twenty days. One of the tumors in my lungs was blocking the medicine that would've helped with the pneumonia, and there wasn't much they could do, as they'd already performed one high-risk surgery on me. They stuck me on numerous meds to see which would reduce the constant pain I was in including Percocet which combined with the fever made me convinced that I was five different people in five different realities and gave me nightmares I was trapped and couldn't physically wake up from. (I'm on morphine now.)

In the end, it was just a matter of waiting to see if I'd miraculously get better or die.

Or at least it was, until my oncologist got me approved for Alectinib, a drug specifically designed to treat ALK-related lung cancer. Within a week after taking it, I was able to sit up again and my health started improving drastically.

A year later I've gone from dangerously underweight and being unable to keep any food down to my oncologist darkly hinting about putting me on a diet. I can walk for about a mile without rest, when I used to have to to hobble and limp around, like an old man before my time.

Best of all, I can bend over and pick stuff up off the floor without screaming and nearly blacking out from pain.

So, I'm alive. I'm on a 'wonder drug' that'll keep me going until my body randomly begins to reject it, and that's when the Fun Cancer Stuff starts. It's not a cure, but it is a reprieve.

It aches to breathe too deeply. I sleep all day sometimes. I'm a bit out of my head on painkillers, and I'm taking a ton of other pills every day that have their own side effects. I never wanted to collect disability, or make other people pay for my treatment, and I feel guilty about it every day. I'm going nowhere and doing nothing all day.

But it's worth it. and I may live long enough to see a real cure someday.

Thank you all for your kind thoughts and concern.

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