Verdictum

As I am sure you can imagine waiting for doctors to tell you something like, "You have cancer" or "I'm afraid it looks terminal" or possibly the results from your most recent PET scan kind of makes time do funny things. It not only stretches out for you ("What time is it?" "Three minutes since the last time you asked...") but the people telling you the news also tries to avoid it as long as possible, thus stretching out your wait because they don't want to say anything.

In all honesty I would prefer to be surprise-attacked by information vs going somewhere and waiting for it. Maybe an email, or a random text message. (Phone: bzzzzzzzz. Txt: You have cancer.) I guess I am much more of the "throw me in the pool and see how well I swim" school.

That said YOU have suffered through two paragraphs already with my dithering, so here it is: The tumors are back to growing. It seems like on average they all increased about 1cm. (For some that was doubling in size, for others that was getting fractionally bigger.) I can't say as I am surprised at all by this. I've been off chemo for almost four months. That's like 25 percent of the time I had off when they told me I was free and clear of cancer. I couldn't really expect them NOT to grow... it's kind of what they do.

Despite this size increase the doctor was/ is eager to try the new regime I am going to be going on starting tomorrow. It's a prostate cancer protocol and thousands of people a month take it. It's a pill I take everyday and then I get a shot once a month on top of that. Thankfully when I Googled the pill it looks to be small, so I don't have to worry about trying to get something the size of my thumb down my throat every night.

Side effects for this kind of hormone therapy are like you might expect... but I really have no idea what to expect because it always seems like side effects are either way worse for me, or way better. I rarely fall anywhere in the middle. We shall see.

The information hasn't really lead me to feel down at all, it's just not really super exciting news. It really doesn't help us too much to figure out what we're going to do with our living situation either... because after three months this whole thing gets re-evaluated again.

Thanks for the prayers and support. We have a bunch of stuff to figure out in the next ten days. Thanks!

~B.
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