Cancer Gone

I met with my oncologist yesterday and the latest PET scan shows no evidence of cancer. I am done with chemotherapy. I will now go into a monitoring phase. If there is a reoccurrence, it’ll most likely happen in the next couple of years. For the next year I’ll need PET scans every two months. After two years it’ll drop to about one scan every 6 months. After 5 or 6 years the risk of reoccurrence is so low that monitoring is not required.

Accurate prognosis is difficult at this time, especially when there is some uncertainty to what type of Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma I have. If I have follicular lymphoma, which cannot be cured, a reoccurrence is more likely. The time between reoccurrence can vary wildly between patients. My oncologist has had patients with follicular lymphoma that have been in remission for over 10 years and are still going strong. If I have a reoccurrence, a more aggressive treatment will probably be considered, such as stem cell (bone marrow) replacement. That will not be fun, so my mindset is that I have the other type of lymphoma, diffused large B-cell (DLBC), which is curable in about 50% of the cases.

DLBC is what my clinic first diagnosed me with. The Mayo clinic later came up with the follicular diagnosis. My oncologist explained that it’s a judgment call between the two types of lymphoma. My clinic had three different pathologist look at my biopsy and all three agreed that I had DLBC. So I’m going with the numbers. Since DLBC is curable with the first round of treatment, I may never need another treatment. I’m going to do whatever I can to make sure that happens. There are medical studies that report exercise can greatly reduce the chance of reoccurrence. I plan to continue marathon running the rest of my life. When I ran my first marathon, at about mile 15 a 70+ year old man passed me up. (If you’re over 40 you have to wear a tag showing your age bracket). Some day I plan to be that 70 year old passing up young bucks on the marathon course.

My 20 mile run went very well last Sunday. I was able to complete it without walking and in a time of 3:32. I can feel my energy coming back this week in my short 6 mile runs. Each day my speed gets a little faster. Now that I won’t be having chemo my remaining training program looks good for Grandma’s. This weekend I’ll run another 20 miler. Next week I’ll taper back my long run to give my body some time to repair. Then I’ll do two 23 mile runs the following weeks. After that I should be in very good shape for Grandma’s and will start my taper down – where I run shorter and shorter distances during the last 3 weeks of training. This gives the body time to fully heal before the race.