One year later -- NED!

Yesterday I passed the one year mark of my cancer diagnosis -- and I am happy to say that I am NED. I'm doing well, feeling well, gradually growing my hair back, and trying to live as normal a life as possible. 

Last week I actually needed my first haircut in over eight months. Mind you, the last "haircut" before that involved DH, and various scissors and razors and was really more of a shave than anything... So my hair is growing very slowly (it first began showing up again last September, even as I was finishing up my chemo), but surely. It even came back pretty much the same as before, just a good bit grayer.

On March 29 I hope to complete my cancer-necessitated reconstruction with my hopefully last cancer-related surgery. My boob man will lift my right boob to make it match my left foob better, and he will also use the excess skin he will remove from my right boob during the lift in order to create a nipple-areola complex for my reconstructed foob. I love it when I can get a twofer from a single surgery! Actually, I'm getting another touch-up while I'm under, as I have a little depression or divot above my foob, where the butcher had removed breast tissue above up high on the chest, above where my implant now is. So he created an unsightly depression, which my boob man will fix with a "fat graft." So hopefully, after this last surgery, I will have a reasonably realistic and symmetric reconstruction -- and be done with surgeries for the foreseeable future!

I am most grateful, though, that I have made it through the first year since diagnosis without any evidence of residual or recurrent disease. For TNBC, this first year has one of the highest rates of distant recurrence (i.e., metastasis) of all kinds of breast cancer -- and it is associated with lower survival rates than other breast cancers (see this article for details). So making it to the one year mark with NED is a good start. Now all I've got to do is stay healthy, continue to exercise, avoid beef and other red meats, and try to eat a low fat diet. All of those should further help keep the beast at bay. 

But for the time being, I'm just happy to be alive and healthy!

P.S.: Since my last entry has apparently attracted some perverts who have used my cancer blog to post obscene comments in Japanese and Chinese, I have decided to enable comment moderation. I just don't want to give those people the opportunity to advertise their unsavory thoughts/sites on my blog. So it might now take a bit for legitimate comments to show up on the website, as I will review them first before posting -- please bear with me.