The Kindness of Strangers
Entry 1 5:28 p.m. CA 19-9 Jenny looked at her CA 19-9 level today while out. I was working. She began texting me. She asked me why her tumor marker, over 37k, is so high. She told me she doesn't want to die. I don't really know how to respond. I say, lamely, I don't want you to die, either. But she has receded, since we moved, back to believing completely that she is going to beat this terminal disease, through sheer will. I must say, she is well exceeding her life expectancy. This disease kills almost everyone with her precise diagnosis. The only way it would not kill her sooner rather than later, is if the mets on her liver went away, she got no new metastases elsewhere, and the tumor and any cancerous lymph nodes were then removed. That would, more likely than not, only extend her life a couple years, and the surgery is brutal--they remove, resection and redirect many of the organs of the digestive tract. It is fraught with risk, and she is...