In two days it will be 16 months since my original diagnosis. October 19, 2018 was when I was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer. A week or so later a bladder cancer diagnosis was added. I started 2020 with a PSA of <0.01 and ended up in the ER because cancer had choked off my kidney. That was followed by a neuroendocrine prostate cancer diagnosis, which my oncologist claims developed separately from the original prostate cancer. A little over a month ago I started chemotherapy, and just yesterday had a new scan which showed significant improvement. Happy dance time!
To summarize using terms my doctors have used, the bladder cancer has not recurred and is presumed cured, the original prostate cancer is in complete biochemical remission, and the NEPCa is responding to treatment. Happy St. Patrick's day indeed!
As always, the much wordier version of the story with pictures is in my blog:
I'm in track with you, diagnosed 09/11/18, PSA 1000+, significant lymph nodes, pelvic and vertebrae metastasis. Just PCa for me and still hormone sensitive as of 01/21/20: PSA <0.02, my last Taxotere infusion was 11/01/19.
Looks like you got a great doc in Natick. Was this your first chemo infusion?
I'm in the Medford, MA area, can't find any toilet paper, but milk, bread, eggs and beer are plentiful.
Think, you're still coding right? I'm split between some coding and technical lead stuff.
Great to hear when the odd are stacked against you - you break out winning!!!
I've had 2 infusions so far, not counting 6 docetaxel infusions last year.
I am still coding though right now I'm on disability leave. We switched over to scrum, so ideally there's no specific technical leads. Of course, our scrum master is also our manager which is a big no-no.
I do like my doc. He used to be at Dana Farber, and my guess is he set up his own practice to get out of the city. It seems he still had lots of contacts there, and I know my case had been before a tumor board, so for all I know some of the best minds in the area (and I would include his) have provided input to my treatment, and I don't need to go into the city at all.
Are you still working? If so, do you find it strange to deal with scanxiety while working? When we would have a planning meeting near a follow-up appointment, I really wanted to put an asterisk on any commitments I might make.
So, "Technical Lead", is really an HR term to get higher salary than just a "software developer"... 😉
I work for a very large healthcare company, patient integration stuff with everything.
I'm an DFCI specimen, a bit brash so get attention, I'm happy with my care at the moment. Natick is nice, you are lucky having your doc connected, all the best!
I'm employed as implied above, my team is all remote, but I'm local to the office, so sometimes show up. I like getting grief from the in house developers.
When we first switched to scrum and didn't know what we were doing, a big blizzard hit so we ended up doing a 6 hour meeting with everybody video conferencing in from home. We also have scrum teams across wide geographic regions working together. It's always fun trying to find a meeting time that works for San Diego, Natck (MA), and Budapest. Is that distant enough?
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