Now You See It, Now You Don't:

Remember that festering tumor on my pancreas that I gave up school, an awesome job, a Spring/Summer internship in NYC, a social life, and my sanity in order to come home and have surgery to get it removed? Yeah well, apparently it's gone. (If you're new to this, I wrote a little recap below. It's not your fault if you don't know. I don't really tell people.) I had a MRI last week and all signs point to the tumor/growth/cyst thing deciding to disappear. Which is great and all. I mean, I am really happy that I don't have to go through the 10-12 hour surgery where they have to take organs out of my body in order to reach the pancreas, spend 3-4 weeks in the hospital recovering, followed by 6-8 weeks of nearly bedridden time at home. That was going to be awful. I wasn't looking forward to it. However, more than anything I was looking forward to the saga being over. It was going to be a great relief when spring came around and I could put this behind me; I wasn't going to have worry about it anymore. Now I will have another MRI and biopsy in six months and then a MRI every year for the next five years, just to make sure it's really gone and doesn't make a triumphant return.

Right now, my surgery, which was scheduled for this Tuesday the 24th, is canceled. I will be having a biopsy next week just to double check that the tumor is really gone. I mean, my doctors have declared a miracle cure once before and were wrong, so I'm still holding my breath. I guess I shouldn't celebrate just yet. However, if it is gone, what the heck am I supposed to do now? I don't go back to school until the end of April... basically I'm stuck at home for no reason. I need a job. Honestly, I am willing to take a job anywhere. I don't even want to stay in Vancouver/Camas. There is nothing keeping me here now. Not to mention, the singles' ward here sucks. I have no friends here, besides my mom and my cat. I feel like I need to get out of here and find a job in a new city or I will go crazy. If anyone knows of anything, let me know!

I just want to say thank you to everyone who has been saying prayers on my behalf. Prayer works! My mom has been telling me for months that she's been praying that the tumor will disappear, I guess she's been living right, or something. Thank you for all your support and love. And thanks to my grandpa who gave me a blessing right before I came home, that probably helped a lot too. Oh, and thanks to my doctors. I have met some really awesome people during this time. Dr. Yuan, you're bomb. And Dr. Meitz, if you weren't like 20 years older than me and married, I'd totally want to have your children. Dr. Lundbland, I really like your hippie hair. And Dr. Sheppard, you're the best surgeon I could have asked for.

I do want to reinforce that there is a possibility that the pathologists will find something again when I have the biopsy next week. If that's the case, then I have written this long, explanatory post for nothing. However, I wanted y'all to know what's happening. My parents tell me that I'm really bad at keeping people informed. I will let you know as soon as I know.

The pancreas is the ugly, yellow, bumpy one. See how difficult it is to get to?

Medical saga recap:
This is the blurb version. Summer 2010, my mom took me to the ER because I had been throwing up for like 6 hours straight and having intense abdominal pain, after my mom stopped thinking that it was just cramps, she got really worried and thought I was going to die from dehydration. She wanted to get an IV in me, so we went to the ER. Well, I was in the hospital for 3 days where they ran a lot of tests. They love those things. I found out two things 1) the throwing up/nausea/pain problem I was having at the time was caused by some bleeding in my stomach (random), 2) when they did a CT scan, they found a growth on my pancreas. Here's where it gets tricky. I won't bore you with the details of the back and forth diagnoses, but over the next year, I saw many different doctors and had many more tests. They couldn't agree for a long time, until this fall when they all came to a consensus that it was a pseudo papillary tumor. Even Sloan-Kettering and Harvard Medical School agreed! We all felt pretty confident about this. Pseudo papillary tumors are most common among women 18-45 (check), although usually seen on the latter end of the scale. They also have like a 15-20% of turning into cancer and since pancreatic cancer is like super scary and you basically die, the tumor had to come out. So I planned to take off winter semester from school and get this thing taken care of. Which is where we are now.