I often want to wait to post on my blog until I have good news, but who is to say what is and isn’t good news. I will tell you what is happening, trying not to judge it as good or bad.

After two months of having my cancer marker numbers go down, they then shot up dramatically for two months. In October, they went up by 600+, the biggest increase I’ve ever experienced in one month. So I had a PET/CT scan to see what is going on. There is progression of disease. Cancer is still mostly in the lining of my left lung, and it has increased in size and uptake value. There are also some spots in other places that could be cancer (not a sure thing).

The treatments my oncologist recommends are toxic treatments that I have resisted for 30 years. If I’m going to do a toxic treatment, I want to at least have the tumor cells pre-tested to see what specific drug it would respond to. To do that requires a biopsy, and she thinks it’s too risky to biopsy something in the lining of the lung. She will verify that with the interventional radiologist.

Two ways of addressing cancer are to kill the tumor, or to create a terrain in the body that isn’t conducive to the growth of cancer and stimulates the body’s self-healing mechanisms. I have always done both, with an emphasis on fortifying the terrain.

I also saw a functional medicine oncologist who specializes in working on the terrain. She ordered about 15 blood tests to see what my terrain needed. After getting those results, she told me that my terrain was as good as it can be. She said there is nothing she can recommend to improve it. She said my cancer was not fueled by either insulin or inflammation (most cancers are).

This is a frustrating situation for me. I’m happy that I have done such a good job of improving my terrain, but I want to do more to improve my self-healing abilities. She did suggest three things that evidence has shown improve outcomes for women with breast cancer, so I have added them to my regimen. I am again using Cannabis in a 1 CBD to 1 THC ratio at night; I am drinking more green tea (she recommends 3 to 5 cups a day); and I am taking a mushroom powder she recommended.

I have stopped taking Tamoxifen since it clearly wasn’t making a positive difference anymore. I have started on another Aromatase Inhibitor that I took 20 years ago – Arimidex. Too soon to tell if it will be beneficial. If it is, I don’t expect long term results. Seems like the effectiveness of any treatment is short lived as the body gets used to it.

I believe there has to be something else I can do to slow the growth of cancer and I will continue to research and learn about new options.