I can’t believe it has been two years since I posted here. Right now the top search referral term for my blog is “Scott Riddle Australia obituary”, so clearly it’s been so long since I blogged that a lot of people think I’m dead. Fair enough!
This week I got the results from a surveillance CT scan, and it was all clear. For those that have followed my cancer journey you’ll know that I don’t really trust CT scans, but a clear result is a clear result - it’s great news. I’m now booked in for a PET / CT scan in October, which is my 5 year marker scan ! A reminder that while I was first diagnosed in July 2017, my cancer returned less than a year after all my 1st line treatment (deemed a very bad sign at the time), so my survival year count starts from when that cancer recurrence was removed in 2019. The fact that I’m still here 4 1/2 years later already puts me in a pretty rare group of Stage 4 survivors.
Bowel Cancer survival rates, by stage.
I find myself finally believing that I might be ‘cured’. Oncologists generally don’t like to use the word ‘cured’ in the context of stage 4 cancer patients but mine has told me that if I make it to five years I can think of my risk of recurrence as being pretty close to anyone getting cancer for the 1st time i.e. I’m back in the normal population (as far as cancer is concerned). This is amazing but it also presents a new challenge that I’m just beginning to wrap my head around.
When you’re told by doctors - over a period of years - that you need to prepare for the worst, when your life insurance actually pays out given how bad your prognosis is, you change the way you think and act. The last few years have been this weird juggle of trying to keep moving forward optimistically, but with immense caution given this huge known risk hanging over me. As a result I ended up pulling back from some aspects of life (think professional life) and investing more in others (think family life). I withdrew myself from any management responsibilities at work. I stopped planning anything too far in advance. I completely restructured our family finances to optimise for my likely death. I stopped investing time in things with any long term pay off if the benefit accrued only to me (instead of my family) - what was the point ?
As I approach the 5 year mark I’m having to reprogram myself. Obviously the risk level has been reducing with every clear scan over the years but I’ve never allowed myself to believe I was ‘cured’. This is partly because doctors have always actively discouraged any ‘false hope’ given my stage 4 diagnosis and partly because it had been so hard to mentally prepare myself for death that I didn’t want to have to do it again if I lulled myself into a false sense of security. Rightly or wrongly 5 years has always been this magical marker for me - the point at which I’d let myself believe I might be ok. And now, suddenly, that is just 6 months away.
I’m spending a lot of time at the moment asking myself what this five year marker means for ‘what next’. When I was diagnosed we were looking at buying acreage and thinking about starting a business. Do I just return to those plans or has the whole cancer journey, the life lived in between it - not to mention a lot of new / changed ‘context’ - fundamentally shifted what is most important and most interesting to me ?
I was a reluctant blogger but it served a great purpose in keeping family and friends apprised of my cancer situation without having to keep repeating myself. I also always found writing the updates helped me process some hard to process stuff. In a strange way I’m finding this approaching five year marker hard to process, so this might be the beginning of a new wave of posts.
If anyone else has been through something similar - actively preparing yourself to die, and then not dying - I’d love to have a chat. I’m also toying with some pretty bold life change ideas post that five year marker, so any thoughts and suggestions on this (especially from those that know me well) would also be very welcome over the coming months.