I’m not in any way religious. But I’ve had news recently that seems to warrant the tag “miraculous”.
Following my surgery in early May I’ve made a good recovery with no issues at all apart from it’s set me back a few months in my fitness journey, so basically back to zero.
There no pain, the wound healed perfectly but I’m very tired at the slightest physical effort. So baby steps to start building that up.
Back to work in a few days.
But the good news initially came about 3 weeks after surgery at my follow up with the renal cancer nurse. I was told that the initial investigation of the kidney that they removed showed no obvious signs of active cancer. Just the necrotic tissue where the cancer was.
She warned me it still needed to be looked at under a microscope but did say that when I was discussed a few days earlier in a MDT meeting the Oncology team stated they’d not had anyone respond to treatment as well as I had.
That was amazing news, although I had lots of questions that stupidly I didn’t think of until after I left the appointment. No cancer seen? Where did the tumour go? Etc.
Then last week I got a call from her with a promised follow up after it had been examined thoroughly.
No sign of active cancer.
I was silent for a moment, then asked about the tumour that was stuck at 4cm for the last 3 scans. That was no tumour, that was the remaining necrotic tissue. The immunotherapy completely removed the cancer from my kidney!
I’ll admin to crying again but this time at the good news.
The next steps are unknown but I’ve since had another round of immunotherapy and am expecting to keep having this every 4 weeks forever.
Words spun around in my head, cancer free, remission, normal life. I’ve yet to speak to my oncologist and this will happen in a few weeks when they have the results of my latest CT scan, taken 3 weeks after surgery.
I hope that shows no tumours anywhere.
So my immediate future looks brighter. Still full of sleep and fatigue but I hope to lose weight and get fitter to aide dealing with the fatigue.
I’ve been increasing walking distances slowly and tomorrow I’m doing some light boxing conditioning with a friend. I can moderate that as needed and hope this will be my go to regime going forwards.
I’ll introduce work, walking further, cycling and motorbike riding in the coming weeks and aim to get close to where I was before diagnosis.
We’ve also finally felt brave enough to book a couple of weeks in the Sun at the end of September. Something I wouldn’t have thought possible a few months ago.
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