You Win Some, You Lose Some

Ever since early January I've been experiencing some pretty awful back pain. It's ranged from a dull tightness that doesn't allow me to stay still, to acute pain that has me literally crawling on the floor.

Hot baths and showers help, as did a birthday morning spent at Le Scandinave!

Anyhow, I got in for a massage last Wednesday when I was feeling particularly rough. I showed up early and that paid off; she snuck me in for more than my allotted hour. It felt great.

On the same day that I was feeling so good from treatment I got the results of my latest CT scan. My Oncologist had ordered one so we could eliminate any of the worst case scenarios as the source of my back pain.

Unfortunately we weren't able to do that.

Only a month after my previous scan, which was fairly clean, I was now showing not only a 2cm blood clot in my liver, but also two 1cm tumors in my liver and five 2cm tumors in my peritoneum.

There's pretty much no way to classify this as good news.

In the days that have passed Christi and I have achieved a certain level of calmness about the whole thing. We finally talked to the kids about it and that went fairly well. Frankie certainly knows something is going on, but she seems okay. Owen has said that he'd rather not have the facts, which I think is his way of saying that he wishes it weren't true.

If there's a silver (or maybe gray?) lining to this backward step, it's this: most cases of pancreatic cancer go this way. Mine just went this way much faster. It's pushed me one step closer to reality, which is a good thing. This is much tougher on my family than it is for me.

For what it's worth, and I think it's worth a lot, I am feeling happy and am looking forward to what ever future I am lucky enough to have.