First, the bad news. On Friday I spoke with my Montreal oncologist who told me in no uncertain terms that I am not spending Christmas in California. His exact words were “you are still in a precarious state.” This bites for several reasons. California is warmer than Cambridge. Our cats are there, whom I miss …
Author Archives: Jonathan Sterne
7 Nov 2024: Cancer Crawl and U.S. Election
I’m pleased to have no doctors’ appointments and no new side effects to report since my last post. It turns out I do not have an infection, and I am back on dabrafenib and trametinib as of yesterday. Tuesday night we went to an election watching party. You all know how that turned out, but …
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5 Nov 2024: A Visit to the Mothership
Yesterday was our first trip back to Mass General since my hospitalization. The place is truly massive. My oncologist here calls it The Mothership and that truly makes sense. I had to be wheeled around in a wheelchair because it would have been impossible for me to walk in my current condition. The first stop …
Cancer Crawl–3 Nov 2024
Since my last post, I’d say I’m living in a split reality. Every day there’s a little progress or something fun, but also every day some new fucking thing as the new chemo works its way through my body. When starting on lenvima I had a rule that a side effect wasn’t real if it …
31 October 2024: Dark Night of the Soul
We all know the cliches: recovery is not linear. You cannot put a timeline on bodies. You don’t understand challenges of recovery until you experience them. It is one thing to know that intellectually and quite another to live it. Coming home has been hard—I have to do a lot more for myself and there …
28 October 2024: home!
At about 1pm today I was discharged from the hospital. With the help of the staff Carrie and I packed up and caught an Uber back to the apartment. I then very slowly, taking breaks, walked up the stairs and into my living room. There’s going to be a bunch of rehab ahead, but since …
Cancer Crawl 26 Oct 2024
A little more about high grade metastatic thyroid cancer of the lungs with a BRAF-600 mutation. Morphologically, it looks totally different under a microscope than papillary thyroid cancer. However, the oncologist I spoke with this morning describes every cancer as having an “engine.” If the engine runs on the same principles, then the targeted therapy …