The past year has seemed the longest in my short history. The illness dragged on.
Illness has taken its toll. Thanks to chemo I still have shingles, my right eye is defective (often sore and blurry), and I feel fluish every second or third day. That is nearly 12 months after starting chemo and nine months after the end of chemo.
I have some lingering anger about the fact that I have now experienced how the pharmaceutical industry holds medical treatment for ransom. I know (because my oncologist has told me) that cancer treatment specialists are fully aware that chemotherapy will not bring any healing to kidney cancer. But the government-backed medical system (pushed by big pharma) insists that chemo be tried before something that will in fact work on kidney cancer, namely immunotherapy. This situation has killed a lot of people, my cousin Karen included. It was immunotherapy that was introduced soon enough to train my immune system to attack the cancer cells in the three new tumours that appeared on my spine at the end of 2017. By the way at the end of chemo in April 2018 it was revealed by CT scans that the tumours had actually grown larger during chemo!! So I might not be alive today if it had not been for the timely introduction of immunotherapy.
Remission simply means that, although the three tumours on my spine are still there, they have stopped growing. I am waiting for the results of a CT scan taken in mid December in Yellowknife. I requested that scan because of some twinges and prickles in my left hip and thigh, similar to the precursor to the discovery of the tumour on my basal spine vertebrae near the end of 2017. It may just be an artifact of shingles. I should get a call from my oncologist at Cross Cancer Institute in Edmonton in the next day or two with details about the scan. Everything slowed to a halt for Christmas and New Years in the medical field.
