It's February 2020 and I'm two years on from a stage four lung cancer diagnosis but I'm still alive and not planning to cash in my chips just yet.
I'll start at the beginning. In January 2018 I felt perfectly fine but I rolled up at the GP complaining that I couldn't do handwriting any more. That 10 minute appointment stretched out to half an hour, with the senior doctor at the practice popping in to add his opinion too, and the upshot was I got sent straight off to hospital with no say-so in the matter. Everyone who spoke to me seemed amazed I had been able to walk to the GP surgery in the first place - scary!
Long story short, I had a brain tumour, that got cut out and the bed irradiated. That tumour was the spread from a lung cancer (confirmed because whenever they cut something out of you they analyse it afterwards.) I had just the one lung tumour proper, a few dodgy spots in my lungs here and there plus well enlarged lymph nodes between my lungs. The consultant gave me six months, tops.
After that, though, so far it's been good news all the way. I tested 80% suitable for immunotherapy and went straight on to 200mg pembrolizumab at 3-week intervals. The lung tumour is stable at 3cc of scar tissue from an original 30cc tumour. The dodgy spots in my lungs seem to have cleared up and the lymph nodes have shrunk down to normal. Recovering from the brain tumour took longer than they told me to expect - after six months they assessed me as recovered but I disagreed and a total of 18 months had passed before I stopped getting "Oh, that bit's working again!" moments. (I'm also aware that the thing I'm using to assess my mental recovery is the very thing that has been damaged.)
The side effects of immunotherapy were a bit of an issue at first but luckily I've had enough time to trial-and-error various ways to offset them so these days they hardly bother me. That's just as well, as I have health insurance that has paid for continuing treatment way past the NHS 2 year cut-off.
And now (February 2023) it's way past time for an update... One of the dodgy spots in my lower right lung didn't clear up after all, and actually started to slowly grow. Eventually the scans said "cancer". Fortunately everything else was stable/dormant/scarring. Much umming and ahhing from the oncologists resulted in me being re-assessed at stage 1 and operable - something that hardly ever happens to someone who has gone as far as stage 4. So right now I'm fresh out of surgery for a lower right lobectomy and trying to breathe properly again. The surgeon says "cancer free" which is really nice to hear, but no promises as to how long I'll stay like that. I'm off the immunotherapy and the side effects from that are subsiding - yay! No more runny nose, my sense of smell has returned and the productive cough has gone.
And finally (June 2023) it's time for another update... The lower right lobe that got resected was indeed cancer, it had a rare KRAS G12D mutation. Surrounding lymph nodes were all clear though, so for now it's looking like I'm going to be okay. Dr Google says that my second tumour might not even have been cigarette-related, it's associated with a low/never-smoking status, so there's the off-chance that I would have been killed by it if I had never had the scans for the primary tumour, which I would never have had if I hadn't had the brain tumour. Every cloud indeed has a silver lining.
Right now I'm on no treatment, just regular CT/thorax and MRI/head scans for the next five years. Today I'm NED (No Evidence of Disease), getting on with my life and will just have to wait before they venture an "all clear". A few months on from the lobectomy finds me getting out of breath more often than I used to and I get the occasional tightness feeling in my side but otherwise there are no ill effects. A few of the immunotherapy side effects have resumed but not all of them - apparently this is a sign that my immune system has adapted maybe permanently. I'm back weight training and slowly getting back to my previous levels of strength and fitness.
I figure I've got off very lightly. Wow - that lot took over 5 years
