Bell of Hope and the Road to Recovery

I finished my last radiation session today and my last day of taking chemo every day for 7 weeks! It feels so good to be done with this part of my treatment and get to move on to recovering from it. I'll get a month off with no treatment of any kind while I wait for the swelling around my brain stem to go down from all the radiation, then another 3 weeks to a month after that, I'll have my first post-treatment MRI where we will learn whether or not the treatment was effective. In this picture, you can really see my 6th nerve palsy making me look kind of cross-eyed! This is what is causing my double vision. You can also see the 12lbs I gained on such a high dose of steroids, haha, I look forward to coming off the steroids and losing that weight again!

Recovering

It'll take two weeks for the chemotherapy to leave my system and for me to regain my platelets and white blood cells, and during that time I will also be weaning off of the 12mg of Dexamethasone Steroids I'm taking every day. We're not out of the woods yet regarding medications and side effects, but not having to take chemo and do radiation every day should make this a lot easier! I look forward to having my energy back. If it is a low-grade tumour, my doctors are expecting my symptoms to take 1-2 months to go to either where they'll be for the rest of my life, or away completely. I hope they go away completely and I don't have to live with any symptoms!

I Rang the Bell so Hard I Broke It

Apparently, this isn't the first time this has happened and they were able to fix it right away so I don't feel too bad, but I rang that bell with such gusto that I broke it! Here's a picture of me with it broken, and then photographic evidence that they fixed it right away.

What's Next?

After my month of recovery, I start a chemotherapy treatment 2.5x as intense as what I'm taking right now, but for only 5 days a month for a year. My doctors recommend taking 2 months to get used to it before resuming a normal life, but they also say I'm very young and will probably not be too horribly affected by it. I am feeling very optimistic both that my treatment so far has been effective, and that the 5 days of chemo a month won't be that bad on me at all and hopefully I'll be able to return to my regularly scheduled life soon! But I guess right now I have to play it by ear.

I will definitely be keeping this blog updated as I learn more about my treatment and what my full recovery will look like so stay tuned!