My Liver Cancer Blog
my first blog, a way for me to process my experience of being diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma
about
I am a professor at a Canadian university. I’m married, have close relationships with my family, love my 2 dogs, love travel, and enjoy hiking (but day hikes only – not really into the hut-to-hut thing). I really hope I can get through this and do some major hikes again in the future. Thank god I also love reading novels (literary prize winners, but also espionage, detective, and sometimes Sci-fi). And thank god I live in an era of excellent tv. And thank god I love writing. There are many things I can still do that I love, even having cancer and being more home-bound than I would like to be.
If you’re new, I recommend starting with How I Found Out.
recent posts
Author: Helagrl
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So, I did go home for Christmas, and spent a wonderful couple of days with my parents and siblings. I love Christmas in my parents’ home — lush poinsettias, a lovely Douglas Fir with decorations made or collected over the years, A Ceremony of Carols and other classIc Christmas music, my brother playing banjo, my…
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(What a great title for the holiday season!) My husband and I have recently become kind of obsessed with a British show called This Farming Life. It’s a documentary style hour-long show that each season follows 5 or 6 farming families in Scotland. Most of them farm sheep and cattle for meat. Each season it…
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I had to go in early this morning for bloodwork before chemo. There’s always something. This time my creatinine levels are too high (though this just in — they are fine now. Phew). Before we left I told my husband I thought that today we should just pretend I don’t have cancer, skip the appointment,…
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Sorry for the long silence. I’ve been deliciously on a chemo pause for 2 weeks (3 if you count the fact that the third week of each cycle I’m off chemo, but see the oncologist). The first week’s pause was due to very low hemoglobin and platelet counts — the lowest they’ve been since this…
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As we exited the hospital yesterday after the meeting with my oncologist, my husband said, “This is the first time in a while that we’re leaving the hospital and I’m not feeling happy.” I agreed. It’s all been good or neutral news for the last few months. But yesterday was a bit deflating. On the…
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the whole time I was writing my second book I worried about dying. I worried that somehow death would take me before I could finish. And then, once it was done and published, I stopped worrying. As if death comes only to prevent you from accomplishing the things you want to accomplish, but leaves you…
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On Nov. 3 I had the second CT scan since starting chemo-immunotherapy, after 6 cycles. (The first scan was in August, after 2 1/2 cycles, and showed no decrease in the size of the main tumor, but one node of the tumor had shrunk by about 1/3. I don’t even really know what this means…
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to watch the summer 2028 Olympics? Will I be alive to see what happens with the 2028 US election? Will I be alive to celebrate my niece’s high school graduation? Will I be alive when my stepdaughter buys her first house? Will I be alive to watch the next season of The Diplomat? I don’t…
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We saw my oncologist yesterday. We see him every three weeks. My chemo-immunotherapy cycles are 3 weeks long – weeks 1 and 2 I receive treatment, week 3 is a break from treatment, but we see the oncologist after I get bloodwork done. So far these appointments have been primarily dedicated to my reporting any…
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At our most recent meeting with my oncologist we learned that some results have come back regarding the genomic analysis of the biopsy material from my tumor. As I mentioned in an earlier post, a tumor’s growth is often driven by a specific mutation, and for some of the more common mutations, there are specific…
My Liver Cancer Blog 