December 1 News

First of all, today is my dad’s 80th birthday. Happy birthday, Dad! Unfortunately he is spending his birthday getting over covid. At least he is past the worst of it. It’s a big sigh of relief that he and my mom are both recovering, even though his celebration of his 80th will have to be delayed.

I also have very good news on the cancer front. There is a new test called Signatera, which is a method for detecting a potential reoccurrence of cancer. Cancer cells release DNA which circulates in the bloodstream. The new method analyses the DNA from your specific tumor and then looks for that specific DNA in a sample your blood. It can give an idea of how much cancer might be circulating before it has grown tumors that are big enough to spot on a scan.

It’s an early warning system for people who know the specific DNA of their tumor. Signatera is a new test, so they were not routinely doing it 2 1/2 years ago when I had my tumor out. By the time I first heard about the test (on Facebook) about a year ago, I figured it was too late for me to do the test.

During my oncology visit in March, my doctor suggested we do the test. I didn’t understand how that would be possible, but apparently tumors are routinely kept. I thought that sucker went out in the garbage 2 1/2 years ago! My doctor’s office contacted my previous medical team in Boston, and located my tumor. When they were ready, they had me come in and do a blood draw at the Tucson office this summer.

Then we waited, and waited.

I had been told to expect that we would find small amounts of circulating tumor DNA, so the first test would be a baseline. We would then repeat the test over time and watch to see if the circulating DNA was going up or down. So I was expecting the “good news” of a low baseline, and then hopefully it going down even lower over time.

When I got a negative result in the mail yesterday, I was momentarily confused. Obviously, when you’re looking for cancer, negative results are great. But I had trouble believing it, since I had been told to expect a baseline value that would hopefully be low. Did the test even work? Was it a meaningful negative result, or just some sort of null?

They told me I would see a low value, not a zero value. I guess they probably wanted to make sure I didn’t panic if the test found small amounts of circulating cancer DNA, because that would not be unusual. Maybe they didn’t think to mention that it could be a very, very low value of zero.

I’m calling this more evidence for NO CANCER! Not only are they not seeing any tumors during my scans, they aren’t even seeing any cancer tumor DNA floating around in my blood. I am hesitant to get my hopes up too high because I want to stay emotionally strong and ready for the worst should that ever happen. But for now it looks like…I might be doing really well!

Of course I’ll still need to keep scanning, and I assume we will do the Signatera test again too. Meanwhile, it’s such a relief to be consistently getting negative results!

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Kristina’s Website: Life Coaching for Adults with Autism