Transitions I just took my first sip of a latte at one of my favorite cafes in Brookline. My first coffee shop trip since surgery! Coffee shops, with their ambient noise (and of course endless array of pastries and coffee), are my favorite places to write. And if you have put one and two together, …
Treatment Meetings and Plan
Warning: This post is long! This is not the usual post where I dive into the emotional aspects of my experience. Rather, this is a pretty cut and dry description of my three weeks of meetings and calls to develop a treatment plan. During my 2014 recurrence, I wrote a similar (...yet less detailed) post about treatment decisions. I received a lot of messages from patients and family members of patients who found that post helpful. This is for that audience. My hope is that this very detailed explanation of my treatment meetings may shed some light on how much information is involved in informing a treatment plan. While I share a lot of detail, I want to note that this is my experience. Every individual's situation and decisions will be unique to them.
Moving forward during treatment: the difficulties of finding an appropriate balance
The following post may seem rather all over the place since it was written while all of these thoughts were swirling around my head. I contemplated rewriting a more refined summary of what you’ll read below, but ultimately I decided that posting the raw version reveals more about what going through this experience is actually …
Medical Update: Good News!
Scan days are always filled with a dose of anxiety. Â I've had countless MRI scans over the past 11 years, and the angst has remained constant. Â I don't have any problem with the MRI itself...in fact I have no problem falling asleep in the machine as I match the rhythms of the magnetic pulses to …
Medical Update 4: Day 1…Treatment Begins
Nothing like a cold blizzard to start off my first day of treatment! Today was my first day of proton therapy at Massachusetts General Hospital's Burr Proton Center, the first place in the world to perform proton therapy on patients. It started at Harvard, and was later moved to MGH...but needless to say, they are the experts! …