Watch and wait has been the mantra for months. Ever since we did my scan last fall and did stereotactic radio surgery. I had multiple metastases show up in my brain. So many, no one is counting how many. Just multiple.
The good news has been they had mostly remained stable since they showed up. Another on pops up here or there. One grows a millimeter, one shrinks a millimeter, others just sit.
Today’s MRI reading wasn’t ready in time for my appointment, my radiation oncologist will share it when it becomes available. She was happy with the scan and reviewed the slides with me, showing us all of the spots, and the lack of visually apparent growth.
This means I will have a report again that shows my brain isn’t stable, but it isn’t unstable. It is confusing.
With this many metastases, the normal protocol is WBR (Whole Brain Radiation) and the prognosis is “bad” in the words of my doctor. Normally this many tumors in the brain means they all start growing and bad things could happen, Somehow, for some reason, my body is holding the tumors in check. She said it could be an immune response to the last set of tumors that we did SRS on, that maybe my treatment was getting through to to brain (which is scary, we just changed treatments, hopefully this one works too). We don’t know what it is, but something is keeping the tumors from following their previous explosive growth.
If a few grow, they can target those with SRS, if they all start growing, I have to prep myself for WBR.
Thus I continue to live in limbo on this. These are the limbos that eat at my heart because they flip over and become emergencies for me in no time. I should be happy, yay, 2 more months went by. I need to be happy. I would be happier if these ticking time bombs would go away and we just couldn’t see them.
One day at a time.
I’ll write about our Key West trip with Little Pink Houses of Hope when I have some energy, great experience! I am of course recovering from traveling as I usually do.
