Friends and Family,

There’s so much good it’s hard to know where to start, so I’ll just take it from the top. Six months ago an MRI showed a couple of spots on my brain, the first time that has happened. Despite my brother Mike’s claims that they must have been looking at someone else’s MRI if they found a brain at all, this new scan showed that I have a “spotless” brain. Squeaky clean you might say, even if the radiologist didn’t.

Next, my oncologist was able to convince my surgeon (it took two conversations) that I would only need to skip one round of chemo instead of two, and miss one day of Tagrisso instead of four, to have the hernia surgery. It paid off in all ways. The surgery went very well, I’m healing nicely, and the best part is that my CT scan showed that the cancer is stable, even after those missed meds. If the surgeon wasn’t telling me to take it easy for the first six weeks I’d be doing the happy dance!

Last week I had my sixty-fifth birthday, which is hard to believe, since I was first diagnosed when I was forty-nine. To put that in perspective, the week before I was diagnosed Pirates of the Caribbean was released, George W Bush had just started his second term as president, and there were 1.25 billion less people in the world. We have long hoped to turn lung cancer into a manageable chronic disease, and we’re getting there. I may be on the leading edge, but I’m hoping this will become expected for everyone before long.

Here’s the last thing to share today: I was honored to participate in a podcast along with fellow EGFR Resisters Ivy Elkins and Jill Feldman. I think this would be especially helpful for people who are newer to lung cancer or who want to know more about biomarkers. There are also a number of other podcasts and a blog on the site that I recommend checking out. Here’s the link: upstagelungcancer.org/podcasts/

That’s all for now! So glad I have good news to share with you today.

Love,

Dann

This post originally appeared on Dann’s Cancer Chronicles on April 29, 2022. It is republished with permission.