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Hello, Patrons and public alike!
It was a big, big week. I finally met with the doctor in charge of my cancer care on Wednesday and the news is, well, weird. By weird I mean the word "incurable" was tossed out, and yet it was still somehow slightly positive.
So, what I thought I had was a 6 cm mass against my kidney. And I do, but this is liposarcoma, which is a cancer that basically looks and acts just like fat. And we all have fat surrounding our organs, which helps protect them. The doctor believes all the fat surrounding my kidney is sarcoma - cancer.
So there is no way to remove it without removing my kidney - and as a reminder, I have just the one stupid kidney.
Even if they could remove it, the doctor said what I have, liposarcoma, is essentially incurable, and would have up to an 80% chance of coming back.
However! There is some good news. My cancer is well-differentiated and low grade. That means it's not aggressive. The doctor said I could live the rest of my life with this and it might not cause a problem.
The treatment, therefore, is to keep monitoring it, and I will be going in for another CT scan six months after my last, which will be in February. The danger is that it de-differentiates and morphs into a more dangerous cancer which could spread throughout my system. If there's sign of that, when/if that happens, then they might do radiation or possibly other therapies.
So that's not exactly the news I wanted, but it's also not as bad as it could be, I guess? I'm actually feeling somewhat relieved after talking to the doctor, because at least now I know.
And what I now know is that I have to live my life. This cancer could take me in a couple years or I could get hit by a truck while riding my bike on the road tomorrow. So I may as well just enjoy life and live with what time I have.
But that's somewhat easier said than done. For the past six weeks I've been in what is essentially a grieving pattern. It is remarkably similar to how it felt when my Mom died last year. I now know in my head that it's time to transition out of that grief and back into the living, but over the past couple days I've found that's going to take a little time to go through that process.
On top of all this, I'm getting cataracts surgery in November. For the past year or so my vision has been getting worse and worse. Turns out I have a particular type of cataract that affects people younger, it moves faster, and it kills vision pretty quickly. I'm actually pretty excited about this surgery as it should allow me to see pretty well again and only need reader glasses the rest of my life.
It should also help with working with Daz3D because the menus in that app are tiny and I have to get my nose right up to the screen to read the damn options.
So, lots of stuff happening, and I'm sorry to lay this all on you guys. I just figured I should in order to be transparent. We're transitioning into a better phase, so expect to see some news about updates coming in the near future. Also, you will see some more Halloween-themed renders coming soon!
As always, thank you all for your support!
-CarbonBlue