I am always telling my friends that I love my blog for many reasons, but one reason is that it reminds me of when things happened. I can look up a blog post and get an idea of when something happened. But I only see that when I look something up. But social media can remind people of things too when it tells you what memories come up. And the other day, the memory photo that came up was from my Disneyland outing right after I found out there was something wrong with my liver (before I knew they were tumors). So I realized that my tumor anniversary was around now.
I don’t know what date to consider my tumor anniversary because there are so many options. Is it when I was at the hospital and found out something was in my liver? Is it when I found out that I had a tumor? Is it when I found out the type of tumor it was? I honestly don’t know which day to acknowledge (similar to how my medical miracle anniversary is potentially multiple days). But I do know that about 3 years ago, I was in the middle of a crazy medical journey of discovering I had tumors and making a game plan about what to do with them.
And when I saw those first images of my biggest tumor, I was so shocked. It did mess with my head because I was having issues feeling disconnected to my body, but I tried to not think about that too much. I knew the risks I was facing with this tumor being in my body and made sure I wasn’t doing anything that added to that risk. And I looked at that first photo hundreds of times because I couldn’t believe that something that big was in my body that shouldn’t be there.
The months between discovering the tumors and discovering they shrunk were also crazy for me. I was dealing with the idea of having these tumors and making preparations to have major surgery to get rid of them. My focus was on that surgery and doing anything I could to get ready for it. When the surgery didn’t happen, that also threw me off a bit and I had to deal with those feelings.
3 years later, I still have the tumors in my liver. But they are all significantly smaller than they were when they were discovered. I will be doing my next MRI soon so we can confirm they are still shrinking. I have no reason to believe that they wouldn’t be. If they stay the same size, then I have to go over a few other options with my liver surgeon. But I don’t think surgery will really be discussed much at that appointment. I’ve already discussed when he would think surgery would be an option and it’s mainly if the tumors start growing again. And if I’m going to have gallbladder surgery (which is something I expect to have in my future), then my surgeon said we can combine the surgeries so I can have my gallbladder removed along with the largest tumor. But I’m hopeful that the tumors have continued to shrink and that will be the news I get in a month.
Like with so many things in my life, it seems like yesterday and a million years ago that I discovered I had these tumors. I’m glad that I don’t think about them all the time as I did right when I learned about them. I do think about them each day when I do some visualization, but that’s only a few seconds a day. Besides those moments, I usually don’t think about them unless I’m telling someone the crazy story of me and my tumors. And it is a fun and crazy story to share.
I’m glad I had a reminder on social media that this is about the time that I discovered the tumors. It’s nice to be able to reflect back on it and think about what has happened in the past 3 years. So much has changed in my life and there is also a lot that has stayed the same. But I think the changes outweigh any stagnation in my life and it’s nice to think about the positive improvements I’ve gone through.
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