Zoom Meeting Results with my Sarcoma Specialist

I just got off a zoom meeting with my sarcoma specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. (Did you know there are 3 Mayo clinics in the U.S.? Arizona, Minnesota, & Florida – just in case you need to know this to win a trivia game some day.) I had been checking every morning and every afternoon this week on my patient portal for the Mayo radiological report. It never showed up. I wanted to have them verify what the local radiologist has seen…that my pelvic tumors are shrinking. My specialist (who I absolutely adore and trust, by the way) said he didn’t even bother to have it read and measured by a radiologist because it was obvious to the naked eye that they were shrinking…which is AWESOME. He said out loud what I had been keeping pent up inside….”At least your tumors didn’t double in size.” That has been known to happen….a lot, actually. LMS is a fickle cancer. It is like playing whack-a-mole with treatments. With any treatment, you have a 30% chance it will shrink, 30% chance it will be stable and stay the same, and a 30% chance it will grow….on chemotherapy. I can’t imagine anything worse than having to go through the horrible treatments and side effects of a chemotherapy to then find out that it not only didn’t work, but it GREW. I hear about that so often on my LMS support group online. So it is working and working quite well. He said it normally doesn’t really become effective (the hormone treatment) until several months into treatment so all of this looks very promising at 10 weeks in. So we are going to continue to stay the course. He gave me a few suggestions about the joint pain. He was expecting that I would have some issues with that, as it is a very common side effect of anastrozole. He also eased my mind a bit with COVID vaccines and what I should and shouldn’t do. So on to the traveling part of my summer! We have a lot planned and I can’t wait to share it all with you in words and photos.

Tomorrow I go and visit my local oncologist and get my next lupron shot for the month.

Rich, Tallinn, and I walked over 5 miles this morning. We went pretty early but it was still pretty warm. I paused on this path and saw the sun shining through the trees and felt it applied to this day and how I feel right now. The sun is shining bright through the shadow of the trees…shedding rays of sunshine in the darker places. This totally summed up how I feel.