Chemopause 5, The Year of Rebecca!!!

Chemopause 5, The Year of Rebecca!!!

Chem-o-pause (noun/adjective)

 Source of word: Made up by Rebecca Mayer

Definition: 1. The pause in chemo that happens when you are in Remission

Pause-temporary inaction especially as caused by uncertainty

Today I celebrate 5 years in Chemopause! I have dubbed this:

                                                   The Year of Rebecca

Technically it’s the year of the monkey, but hell I deserve a year!

As of today, I have been in Chemopause for:

5 years
60 months
261 weeks  

1,827 days
 2,632,121 minutes
157,927,306 seconds  

When I started this hideous Cancer journey of mine, I was told that I had a 65% chance of surviving for 5 years. I count my survival from the date that I actually had my last chemo August 10, 2011 (other people count it other ways)…

hey guess what????

 I’M STILL HERE!!!!! I’M STILL STANDING!

I’ve survived 3 months of daily radiation, combined with weekly chemo, a 6 week hiatus from that, followed by life threatening surgery to remove my lymph nodes in my chest and my middle lobe of my right lung, followed by 6 weeks recovery and 3 months in a hospital bed in my living room, which was all followed by another 4 months of intense and extremely harsh chemo, which caused horrible reactions and necessitated 2 separate Platelet transfusion.

It’s been a scary few years for me and probably that anxiety of recurrence will never go away….

Walter got to wave the stuffed cat over me in April….my joke on Cat scan

I had a Cat Scan in April that wound up showing a 3mm spot in my left lung, unfortunately I saw the results on the Patient Portal before my doctor called me and I had a massive freak out….I’m allowed to, that’s some scary stuff. My original Cancer started out as a small spot on my right lung, so to see something like that on a report is terrifying.  My blood work was good, except for a CEA marker that has been going up…CEA stands for Carcinoembryonic Antigen. Nobody is sure what that is about, so we will watch this in future blood work. I am still in the single digits for that, so that’s a positive. My surgeon looked at the Cat Scan and did not freak out…but we decided to go for the Pet Scan to make sure nothing lit up.

So…..2 weeks ago, I snuck around like a teenager and went in for a Pet Scan at the hospital. I registered and was waiting when I realized that I forgot to have Walter wave one of the dogs over me before we left the house. I am VERY superstitious about the animal waving before my scans…so being the awesome guy that he is, he pulled up a photo of the dogs on his phone and we stood there in the hallway, with people all around us, and he waved his cell phone all over me, front and back. I was cracking up and honestly could care less what anyone thought. Once they took me back, I listened to my song “Moonlight Mile” for 60 minutes nonstop after my injection , you have to wait that amount of time for the injection to work its way through you entire body and nobody can be with you, it’s a lonely scary time and then I sang it to myself in my head throughout the 45 minute scan, as I am claustrophobic and cancer phobic. I also practiced selfies in that cold little room, lol they need work.

The results were good!! I won’t go into all the technical medical jargon; I know youguys would have to Google it, so let’s go with regular people words for now.

 Nothing lit up!! That’s a good thing!

Ok, small amount of technical stuff so you know why that’s important: The positron emission tomography (PET) scan creates computerized images of chemical changes, such as sugar metabolism, that take place in tissue. Typically, the patient is given an injection of a substance that consists of a combination of a sugar and a small amount of radioactively labeled sugar. The radioactive sugar can help in locating a tumor, because cancer cells take up or absorb sugar more avidly than other tissues in the body.

So, all that being said……I have hit 5 years in Chemopause!! This is a milestone for me!!! J

Will I run out and get something that says “Survivor” on it…probably not since I feel like that would bring me bad luck (a kinehorah for those who know Yiddish). 

I will continue to call this Chemopause- it’s my word I made up and I’m comfortable with it, plus it makes people laugh when I say it and explain it. 

I am going to make a shirt that says Chemopause x 5 stay tuned for a pic soon.

So for the most part, I think Sir Elton John’s song: “I’m Still Standing” says it for me right now, especially some of the lyrics and the chorus

Don't you know I'm still standing better than I ever did
Looking like a true survivor, feeling like a little kid
I'm still standing after all this time
Picking up the pieces of my life……

Stay cool in this ungodly heat, hug a friend, hug a puppy, look at the stars, eat the damn cake and chocolate, you deserve it (you only live once) and always be thankful for what you have.

For my friends who are living with Cancer, caring for someone with Cancer or have lost a loved one to Cancer, and in memory of our friend Larry who recently passed away from cancer….. I send you my love and hugs. Be good to each other!

With love and hugs

Rebecca