Dang. Cancer seems to be popping up everywhere these days. We have a friend who is currently dying from pancreatic cancer. My dentist just barely made it through kidney cancer. As I did, you will be learning a lot about cancer that you never wanted to know. Mine is very different from yours, and there are an almost mind boggling number of other types. I don't want to make this about me, but in the spirit of an educational PSA I'll describe what I have. For the record, I cannot blame it on the covid shot.
I have a non-smoker type of lung cancer that has metastasized to the brain. It had no symptoms until I had an increasing loss of hearing in one ear, that is now 100% deaf. An MRI about 10 months ago showed "innumerable" small brain tumors, one of which was on the affected auditory nerve. The number and locations of the brain tumors makes surgery infeasible. The only direct treatment is whole brain radiation, which I'm not very receptive of. The tumor pattern was indicative of a metastasized cancer from somewhere else, not brain cancer. Next came the PET scan which showed lung cancer, followed by a lung needle biopsy (with a bonus collapsed lung). The prognosis at this time was "your time may be short", and I was an emotional wreck. First test results of the biopsy tissue confirmed lung cancer, then newer technology stepped in. Gene sequencing showed a very specific mutation of one particular gene. It turns out to be the #1 most common cause of non-smoker lung cancer. Thanks to much research on this one mutation, there's a "targeted therapy" available in the form of a very expensive once-a-day pill. The condition is considered incurable, but the pill shrinks the existing tumors a bit and arrests their growth. The rub is that the body eventually adapts to the pill, tumor growth resumes, and there's no known effective treatment at that point. The median effectiveness of the pill is in the 2 year ballpark, with some outliers measured in weeks, and others a lot more than 2 years. I get routine MRI and CT scans every 3 months to see if growth is resumed. So far, so good, I'll try to keep myself in good shape, and hope to be one of the longer term outliers. The pill I take has a huge list of side effects not at all the same as chemo side effects. They range from annoying to deadly. I have a lot of the annoying ones, but considering the consequences, I'm OK with tolerating them.
