I've moved my LiveJournal to dreamwidth and will probably closing this one down eventually. Or not.

Just a quick note to let people know that last Friday I had my first infusion of Avastin. I'll be getting these every two weeks going forward. Avastin is an artificial antibody that attacks the blood vessels that supply cancer tumors with sustenance, and thus prevents them from growing and spreading. The tech who started the infusion for me said ( Read more... )

As some of you have no doubt heard through the grapevine (and others no doubt have not), I got my first post-chemo MRI yesterday, and the results were not good. They found tiny dots of cancer in the area where the tumor used to be, and, much scarier, they also found tiny dots of cancer on the other side of the well of spinal fluid in the center of ( Read more... )

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I think it's worth noting that I have taken my last dose of chemo, hopefully for the rest of my life. My brain surgery was on December 10, 2016, so it has been over a year of treatment that knocked the crap out of me. Surgery, radiation+chemo, then twelve months of chemo. The chemo was on a 28 day cycle, so more of a lunar month, really. I should ( Read more... )

Yesterday was a milestone of sorts. I saw an oncologist (not my new neuro-oncologist, but a sweet old medical oncologist who is filling in now and then during a transitional period), and he gave me the okay to start my twelfth and final -- FINAL! -- round of chemo. Yes, friends, fourteen months (nearly fifteen) since the tumor was discovered, the ( Read more... )

I'm one of Sarah Gulde's TAFF nominators, and because the voting deadline is coming right up, we are taking the unusual step of posting the PDF of the new issue of Chunga (#25) before we've mailed out the paper copies. If you haven't made up your mind about who to vote for yet, please download the PDF of the new issue, read Sarah's delightful ( Read more... )

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