RE:RE:JFM - How is your 2024 starting off?You have successfully fought this beast of cancer off for so many years, I am going to assume you will continue to be able to do so. At the same time, I can imagine how wearying and stressful the never-ending battle must be. As you are now going down treatment paths that are more difficult, it must be even harder. Kudo's to you for handling it as well as you have for as long as you have and not giving up.
As you know, I am a Christian who believes Jesus paid my price for my sins (and everyones who express faith in Him) and will welcome me into heaven whenever my time here on earth is up. So, the prospect of death, while always daunting, is not only less concerning but actually hopeful. Whether it is cancer or something else, we all know our days here on earth are numbered. I really hope when your time comes it is the result of something other than cancer just so you can know you did not let it win this battle you have valiantly engaged in for so long! For me, it is good to know there is an eternity in heaven with a loving God to look forward to. While admittedly I know little about what your religious beliefs may or may not be, given your scientific and educated background, I can imagine the odds of you being a Christian are not high. Still, I would still like to share with you some excellent Christian bible teaching from a now deceased pastor by the name of Derek Prince. Here is a link to a long list of topics he has taught on - you need to page down a little to get the alphabetical list of topics. Wherever you might be on the spiritual spectrum, I would be surprised if you did not find hope in some of these teachings. One of these is entitled "God's Medicine Bottle" wherein Price describes his own battle with an intractable health problem while he served in the British army in WW II in the deserts of North Africa - the worst place he could be for his condition. But there are numerous teachings here which might bless you. There is little better I can offer you over this website than this outstanding teaching and I hope you will be blessed by it.
https://www.derekprince.com/radio
As for me, I recently was blessed to very narrowly dodge a major health problem. My father passed away from his second heart attack 37 years ago and my older brother has had some heart issues too, so I have always tried to be vigilant in keeping tabs on my heart. While I had very little evidence that something might be amiss, I still went to my doctor at the end of September and shared with him that I had some very slight, very infrequent tightness in my right pectoral muscle. He ordered a stress test and it showed I had "mild ischemia". That led to a nuclear stress test which showed the same mild ischemia. Now, I otherwise aced the stress tests - no pain after going a full 12-13 minutes. I was not huffing and puffing or sweating or in any distress at all. Furthermore, I had been engaging in various forms of exercise recently including riding my bike on a local trail that ended with a long uphill climb which I attacked in the bike's highest gear. I never had any pain or shortness of breath after that - I actually felt really good. The few incidences of slight tightness I felt occured when I was at rest. My cardiologist thought it would be good to have a heart catheterization to check things out but my health insurance company said given my stress test and other results, they would not approve a heart cathertization! So, my doctor pivoted to a cat scan (CTA with contrast) of my heart so they could get a better read of whether there was a need for a heart catheterization but the insurance company shot that down as well. Very much wanting to know more about this mild ischemia, I said I would pay for the cat scan myself. The hospital that performed the cat scan somehow failed to read the results in a timely fashion, so I went to the hospital, picked up the disc of the results and brought them to my doctor to read. That turned out to be key as the hospital finally got around to reading the results but read them wrong. Fortunately, before those poorly interpreted results were available, my doctor had read the test correctly and saw that I had at least one issue that needed to be addressed and was able to convince the insurance company to go ahead and approve the heart catheterization. I had the procedure on December 11th and that is when they discovered my right coronary artery was 99% blocked! The doctor who performed the procedure of placing a stent to open the artery back up said I was probably just a few weeks away from a massive heart attack. I also got two stents placed in the widowmaker artery which was 70-80% blocked. As you can see from the above there were a lot of places along this two and a half month journey through the US healthcare system where things could easily have taken a bad turn for me and I may have ruined our family's Christmas, if not a lot more, but I am happy to give credit to the Lord for making sure that did not happen. So, despite THTX's ongoing travails, I am in a very thankful mood! It also means I will likely be here for the imminent birth of our first grandchild (our daughter is 4 days past her due date right now).
I was blessed by the right decisions being made at the right time at several key points along the way and I have no doubt the Lord helped that happen. You, however, seem more in need of an outright miracle. The good news is miracles still do happen and I will continue to pray that you will be miraculously healed. And I encourage any other Christians reading this to pray likewise for JFM as Jesus made it very clear that faith was required for a miracle to occur. The more faith we can muster the greater the probability JFM can be healed in a miraculous way. Perhaps the treatment options still at your disposal JFM will be sufficient to extend your life, but since they sound onerous, I am going to continue to pray for that miracle that would defeat your cancer quickly and permanently.
jfm1330 wrote: Hi SPCEO
Thanks for caring about my situation. I am still on the same chemo that I started last March. It's hard. Tumor load was stable at the last Ga68 scan in October, but nonetheless, hormones markers in the blood are slowly going up. I am waiting for news from my doctors to have what they call hepatic arterial embolization. That's a procedure to block, with smalls polymer beads, the small hepatic arteries irrigating tumors in the liver in order to kill them. it won't cure the cancer, but it could decrease my tumor load in the liver and reduce the hormones secreted by neuroendocrine cancer cells. But the cancer is also in the bones and a few lymphatic nodes.
Again, my cancer is incurable, all I can hope for is to live with it as long as possible as some kind of chronic disease involving a sharp decrease in physical capacities, and life quality, because of the cancer itself, but also because of the side effects of the chemo and other treatments. This chemoembolization procedure from what I read is quite rough for the patient. When it works it's worth it, but you are in for a rough month after the procedure. So it's not easy and I am not talking about the psychological stress, not knowing when this thing will enter the final phase. It can be in a year or if I am lucky with new treatments, it could be in 10 years. I still have a few options, but none is a cure, or guaranteed to work, and none is easy.
So thanks again for caring about me and I hope things are fine for you.
SPCEO1 wrote: I am hopeful you are winning your health battle and that 2024 marks a turn that leads to restored health for you. Keep up the good fight!