Processing, please wait

Please wait while we process your request

BB

Betsy Bowman
Wait ... what? I\'m not in charge of everything?

BB

NED


Here's the view of the 8th floor of the MGH Yawkey building from the Longfellow Bridge as I waited for the Red Line to go home (or was I going back to work ... I can't remember!) after my last day of chemo at the end of October.  I've said it a million times, it's pretty over there, and I genuinely appreciate that.  It has made the whole experience more bearable for me.  And I love this picture - the idea of the whole thing in my rear view mirror as I head back to my side of the river to move on with my day and my life.  

It feels good to be done.  And really weird at first.  I don't suddenly feel awesome.  The effects of chemo are cumulative, and some of them actually even get a little worse for a while before they get better once it's all over (neuropahty in particular.)  Hair won't start growing back for another three months.  I still feel pretty exhausted at the end of the day, and I DID finally catch the cold that's going around, so that doesn't help either.  And for these first few weeks I was walking around with this horrible doubt in the back of my mind .... what if it all didn't work?  Clear cell ovarian cancer is sometimes resistant to chemo .... what if it didn't work?  I'm an optimistic person to the core of my being, so I just kept going with the assumption that everything was fine.  That of course it worked.  That I really am on the verge of leaving it all behind me.  

Finally this past week I got the official declaration that it DID work.  That on November 11, there was "no evidence of disease" (what the cancer survivors just call being NED!)   A CT scan and a particular tumor maker in my blood all look normal and my oncologist said I'll be able to officially fire him a year from now.  I like those people a lot .... and I feel great about the idea of firing them!  

So that's awesome.  

The thing now is to decide how comfortable I and the team are with the current state of affairs, or if we want to take a few more agressive steps to try to keep this little beast from coming back.  It's tricky .... I could do nothing and never have a recurrence for the rest of my life.  Or I could go forward with some other treatments and it could come back in a year.  There are simply no gurantees in this stupid chess game.  

In the next few weeks I'll keep working with the super smart people to try to help me make some of those decisions.  None of it is urgent - like I have to decide NOW.  So I'll take my time and learn what I can and talk to lots of people and figure out what (if anything) I want to do next.  And in the meantime I'll keep rocking my stylish head scarves and work on getting back to exercising more and expecting to feel a little more normal every day.  

And I'll let you know if anything interesting happens ....

Processing, please wait

Processing, please wait
Top