One thing I’d like to clarify is that my return to work does not mean I’m cured. I still have cancer and the plan is to continue treatment indefinitely. While my cancer is considered incurable with current treatments, there are multiple stories on the internet of men who have responded to treatment for years and watched as their scans gradually improved over time.
My treatment is primarily centered around suppressing the testosterone that signals the cancer to grow. In this regard I’m much like a middle aged dog that’s been fixed. I spend a fair amount of time sleeping around the house, but still take great delight in occasionally chasing the cat around the house. I have also been known to chase cars when out on a run (and that’s the truth!)
So about those asterisks. Ongoing treatment brings about ongoing side effects. The worst side effect is fatigue, but that’s mostly controlled through a combination of exercise, an antidepressant, and making sure I take time to rest. I’m working full time but spend a couple days a week working from home. That’s been a very effective strategy as I’m quite functional most of the time but still have the occasional day where my body just decides to quit on me. It’s much easier to insert a nap into a workday when working at home, and I avoid the extra drain of a lengthy commute.
And that second asterisk is about having realistic expectations. My disease didn’t appear overnight, and has probably been secretly growing and spreading through my body for years (and evading the PSA screening tests I did have, yikes!). That means that last summer I was living with undiagnosed and untreated advanced cancer and didn’t know it. My expectation at the time was that I was a healthy 50 year old. I couldn’t explain why I had frequent migraines, fatigue, back pain, and generally couldn’t be bothered with attempting to engage in social activities. In retrospect, I was trying to live a normal life with a sick body, and that became increasingly difficult.
Cancer sucks. You really don’t want to have cancer. If you are unfortunate enough to develop cancer, a cancer diagnosis is actually the greatest thing in the world. It allows the disease to be treated, and once you know what you’re dealing with you can set expectations accordingly. It’s much easier to live with diagnosed cancer that’s responding to treatment than it is to live with undiagnosed disease and trying to pretend nothing is wrong. When people are amazed that I’m still running, I want to say “you should be more amazed that I was running at all a year ago”.
So I find myself in the rather pleasant position of seeing my health improving combined with realistic expectations of what I’m capable of. Contrast that to last summer when my health was deteriorating rapidly and I’d fail to meet a series of lower and lower expectations. That in a nutshell is why I’m feeling so great these days.
I’m also very thankful for all the advances that have occurred in the past decade. Two of the major drugs I’m currently on were approved in the past 10 years. Modern video conferencing technology allows me to attend work meetings anywhere my laptop has an internet connection. It’s also very fortunate I chose a career where a laptop allows me to be productive at almost any time and place. And let’s not forget the company I work for which has great health insurance and disability coverage.
I had my most recent visit with my oncologist just over a week ago, and my blood tests still look fantastic overall. I probably won’t have another blood test until October. That’s a huge change from having weekly tests during chemotherapy, and marks the transition from intensive treatment back to a new normal life. “New normal” takes into account ongoing treatment along with regular tests that can provoke extreme anxiety.
Allow me to go off on a tangent about routine testing. Have you ever had an unexplained symptom or lump or something where you had a scan or biopsy or some other test to determine if it was cancer? Do you remember how anxious you were waiting for the results? When they came back negative, did you refer to it as your cancer scare? Once you have advanced cancer, you have a cancer scare every 1-3 months for the rest of your life. And by definition you’ve already had one or more such tests come back with very bad news. It’s enough to cause a bit of PTSD with every follow-up test, and I’ve yet to figure out how to not worry about such things. Suffice to say I don’t have to worry about the prostate cancer again until October. Oh wait, I have a cystoscopy to check for recurrence of bladder cancer in August. Crap. Worry. Don’t try to tell me it will all be fine. People told me that last October and it decidedly wasn’t fine.
Gasp Gasp Pant… deep breath. Okay. That’s not until August, let’s go on with wrapping up this blog post.
Where was I? Transitioning to a new normal life, yes. I fully expect my current treatment will continue to work for years. That’s enough time for me to do many epic things, and also time for newer, better treatments to become available. Maybe they’ll even develop a cure, though I wouldn’t hold my breath for one. I’m very much hoping to live long enough to use my retirement savings for retirement. But not yet. Obstinate man is too stubborn to let a disease tell him when it’s time to stop working.
