Happy Easter/ Wesolych Swiat Wielkanocnych!

A happy Easter indeed. And here I am finally having pulled myself together and sitting down to write a long long overdue update.

Since I last wrote, I have been faced with what seemed an impossible crossroads on the treatment front. As I mentionned in the last post (over a month ago), I have been torn with the question, as a fellow refractory cancer patient put it: 'to allo or not to allo (transplant)'. I am happy to write that I have finally found an inner peace with a most difficult decision and now embrace it with compete faith.

Every one of the many doctors I consulted during the past month agreed on one thing - that for me THERE IS NO RIGHT ANSWER.. Simply far too few patients with my kind of track record (ie heavily pre-treated including a past failed autologous transplant, with my particular rare kind of advanced cancer -refractory sALCL), to know what to do next with me.

At the end of the day I followed my gut and decided to take a leap of faith and not do the proposed allogenic transplant now. I opted out after weighing out the immediate risks, which include a high treatment related mortality. Shortly after I made this decision, I got approval for an extension on my current treatment!!

So happy for this; for now things with the current therapy are keeping the disease at bay which in itself is a huge improvement compared as you well know, to how I was doing this time in the past 2 years.. We are still unclear how many more treatments I will get. This depends on a number of factors (funding, my response to the drug and toleration of its associated neurotoxicity), so I will just have to take it one cycle at a time and we will see how it goes from here.

Other than all this going on behind the scenes, we continue to juice daily and I take various supplements mentionned before to help support my immune system, slowly decreasing from 10,000 IU daily of vitamin D3 now that I try to spend as much time out in the sun when it is out :) Feels so good to be alive!!

Konrad captures this moment in the sun, me and Karolek, Easter 2012

During Easter the three of us spent lots of time (and lots of eating) with our families, and for Karolek chocolate treats from the Easter Bunny were a huge hit with him after he for the first time, gave up chocolate this year during Lent. We also got a chance to have an Egg Hunt for him and his friends out in our backyard on a sunny afternoon. Thankful for all this.

Thank you to those of you I have reached out to for advice in this difficult past few weeks. I cannot tell you how much it means to feel the support I do from everyone around me. I have had many reminders to keep my faith strong. I heard a wise man recently say, 'we must exercise our faith like we exercise our muscles. And pray to God that he may give us our faith' :) Nice and simple, but it really hit a chord that stuck with me. A dear friend also reminded me of a song, 'Be not afraid, I go before you always, come follow Me, and I will give you rest'.. These words are among those that now resonate with me, and have helped me to restore my sense of peace.



Karolek brought this Easter card home from Junior Kindergarten


I pray that this Easter and the spring in the air brings you and your families first and foremost FAITH, PEACE and renewed HOPE. May God bless you all.