A Good Update

Yesterday I had my first PET scan. It was scheduled for 1:50 pm. They told me to fast at least 6 hours prior to the appointment. So I woke up early and I ate my breakfast early. Then they told me that I need to drink a ton of water which I did. It was so hard to fast and I kept thinking of all the food I can eat. I only had to fast for 6 hours and I was already suffering. I started to understand just a tiny bit of what my parents had to go through when they were legitimately hungry when they were younger.

The way it works is that when I fast, I'm basically starving my body of readily available sugar (fuel for the cells) and before it taps into its reserve energy (fat in my thighs). Then when I show up, they inject me with sugar water loaded with radioactive element. This way, any cells that are hyperactive and acting up, it would be hoarding all of the sugar water with radioactive element and the machine will pick up these radioactive elements. Hyperactive cells when I'm resting would be my brain, my kidneys (working to process those sugar water, you know?) and...very very hungry cancer cells. So the areas that hoard lots of these radioactive sugar water will light up like the sun in the scanner. This is how they measure and see where the cancer are in the body.

I'm having this done to see if the drugs I'm currently taking are working. So I did it and today I had an appointment with my oncologist to go over the scans.

Here are the good news:
1. The tumors in my breasts and liver are gone!
2. A bunch (maybe half) of the tumors in my bones are gone!

There are still some tumors in my vertebrae, my right arm, and a small amount in my hip. It's amazing to see the changes in my body with the scans from earlier this year. Earlier this year, the tumors in my hips were so huge that you could barely see the actual bones. However, it looks like it's healed by about 50% now. Yay!

My oncologist told me that I'm right on track with the current drugs. We will continue to monitor via scans. Hopefully the drugs are working and that it will help erase the bulk of the tumors. There is a chance that the tumors will develop a resistance to the drug, then we would have to try a different drug or another method of treatment.

I had a thought that the tumors are kinda like colonies that spread out and settled down somewhere and multiplied. And depending on where they are, they might have more DNA alterations and evolve into another group of tumors slightly different from its mama tumor. Kinda like how migration and evolution of the same squirrels that have spread and evolved based on new environments.

Today, I also wonder what my tumors are like. Are they soft, hard, what are the textures? What color are they? I'm carrying them in me but I don't know they're there. They're like that antisocial roommate who never comes out of their room but you are aware of their presence because they left a spoon in the sink or you can hear their quiet music through the door. They're probably engorged in blood. What I learned from my class is that cancer cells have this nifty ability to cause the area they reside to make a shit ton of new blood vessels so they can get all of the blood's nutrients and oxygen to feed their frenzy growth. So yeah, it'd be cool if I could see them and touch them.

Strangely I don't harbor any hatred toward them. I'm curious about them. They were a part of me and still are a part of me. They are me. They are silly in that they get so hungry and grow so fast that they're consuming me in the process.

You know how in people's obituary they usually say things like "So and so finally succumbed to cancer and die"? Well, I want my obituary to read "LeTran is finally consumed by her cancer baby..." Consume is a truer word.

Here's a cute photo.

Pain is probably good for me

On Wednesday 8/15/18 at 4:30 pm, I took my last dose of morphine. Why? I left my morphine bottle downstairs and I was too lazy to get it for the nightly dose. Then I got the bright idea that since I was already lazy maybe I should go off morphine to see my true base pain level. Ever since I broke a bunch of bones in my spine and then my hip at the beginning of the year, I've been on morphine to deal with the pain. It was a good 8 months. I wanted to know if the pain was still there or I can deal with it.

I've tried to ween myself off morphine before but what it does is that the withdrawal made me think that I'm in a lot of pain so I always go back to it. But this time, I decided to go cold turkey and suffer the symptoms knowing that it would eventually be over.

What I didn't prepare myself for are the withdrawal symptoms. I also was stupid and didn't look it up to prepare myself for it. It started with violent diarrhea. You know why? It's because there are morphine receptors in your digestive tract. So when you're on morphines, the molecules attached themselves to the receptors and caused your digestive tract to slow down so you get horribly constipated. Because I stopped taking morphine, my body's natural morphine is not enough to fill all of the receptors so my digestive tract is like: oh shit, let's go into overdrive! So then I just have constant diarrhea.

By Friday, it got pretty bad. I got very very depressed. I just sat there and cried the whole day. Good thing I was working from home that day. That night, I had to catsit a few cats and being unaware of all of my symptoms, I went anyway. I started seeing things in double and had to cover one of my eyes so I could drive accurately. After the cat visit, I had a feeling that terrible things are about to go down and I wouldn't be able to operate like going out to get food or fed myself. I knew I would have to lock myself inside and hide from the world for a while to be safe. So I stopped by Safeway on the way back home and got some high calorie food to stock up so I can hibernate. Yes, I was a very functional drug addict.

I think Friday and Saturday were the worst days. I couldn't sleep. I was irritable. I felt like I want to be violently ripped out of my body because of how uncomfortable it was. I was anxious. I started to hallucinate and saw things out of the corner of my eyes. In the middle of the night, I woke up because I had to vomit but I couldn't make it out of bed so I threw up everywhere in bed. So then I got up and changed all of the sheets and blanket in my delirium. I literally thought I was going to die. It seems so dramatic now but I totally thought that dying was probably better.

Not only that, morphine withdrawal also made my skin so tingly that it hurt. My scalp hurt so much that every single movement of my hair hurt. I wanted to rip my hair out because it might solve the problem.

By Sunday, I started to be normal again and acted normal. The symptoms died down by a lot. I was still a bit irritable and skin was still tingling but I could operate and stopped crying. Once I got out of the fog, I realized a few things:

1. I felt more like my old self. I felt determined and very ambitious!
2. My appetite came back. The previous week, I was extremely sad because I missed being able to eat. I missed going to the gym and then eat two burritos. I missed craving food. Food was no longer a joy in my life and I just eat food because if I don't eat, I'd die. But once the morphine was gone, I started to crave food. I started to eat more snacks. I enjoyed my food more. I'm back in love with food.
3. I'm much happier. It was not noticeable during the previous 8 months because so much was going on and the changed happened gradually so change wasn't noticed. But now I realized that I'm much happier and cheery than before.
4. My pain isn't bad. It felt like really bad sore after a day of working out really hard. If I remember to stretch every hour or so, I can function normally. Sometimes, I would need a back massage to assuage the pain but it's not excruciating. I would much rather deal with the pain than go back to lacking feelings.
5. The world seems so much brighter and more vibrant! Morphine made everything seem so dull. Like I had a veil thrown over my head the whole time.

Lesson of the month? Don't do drugs, kids! It's not fun.

This experience got me thinking. Most of the time, when people needed help ending their lives due to illnesses, they use morphine to drift into a painless and peaceful death. I thought that was what I wanted also. However, after going through this, I'm not sure that's what I wanted anymore. I think I want to die kicking and screaming in pain if necessary but at least I would be able to feel things. I would be able to experience the world fully for what it is instead of being filtered and dulled by something. I don't know, perhaps I would change my mind once I'm not my death bed. But for now, I want to die with excruciating pain if need be because at least I can die being myself. I really missed me.