….and breathe… all ok

So, having sent yesterday’s anxious blog out into the wild, I then spent the rest of the day feeling faintly embarrassed and self-indulgent. Thankfully some very good friends were on hand to reassure me that it’s ok that I find all of this hard and that it’s also ok to tell people that’s how I’m feeling.

Thankfully today’s meeting with my doctor was a ‘scans are fine Lucy’ one and all before I’d even sat down. Joyfully nothing to report and no more scans until early September and so Andy and I can fully enjoy our trip to Kos in a couple of weeks and there’ll be a family holiday at the end of the summer. Plus, I can just revel in the fact that I get to see little Max finish school next week and the cancer-gods/gremlins aren’t taking that away from me.

Every scan is awful but some are worse than others and this was definitely a bad one. I sometimes fear that by making a fuss people will think that I’m like the boy who cried wolf but the reality is that unlike immunotherapy that has the potential to cure (although sadly it didn’t for me) the targeted therapy is not known for it’s longevity. The tumours inevitably develop resistance as the cancer mutates and adapts and finds ways of bypassing the roadblocks created by the drugs. Back when I was originally diagnosed you’d be given a single agent targeted therapy and the likelihood was that if lucky this might buy you 6-9 months. These days the drugs are given in combination – essentially making it harder for the cancer to bypass but they still don’t last. In that I’ve been on Encorafenib and Binimetinib for over 7 years now I do have to assume that the previous 5 years of immunotherapy I received is probably also having an impact but it’s impossible to know what impact it’s had and what it’ll mean for how long I can hope to get out of my current magic drugs.

But these thoughts are for another day. Today, I get to just enjoy the sense of relief that for now, everything is ok.