The March update — results I really wasn't expecting

I've been building up to writing this one for a while. Partly because I needed to sit with it for a bit. Partly because the emotions around it are more complicated than I expected them to be. And partly because I wanted to write the meditation post first — because I think it has a bearing on what I'm about to tell you.

Late March. Oncologist appointment. Three month scan results.

The appointment

I walked in the same way I always do. Braced, but not terrified. She started in her usual tone — measured, clinical, calm. Nothing in her manner suggested anything different was coming. And then she said something I genuinely wasn't prepared for.

My biggest tumour had shrunk. From over 9cm down to around 7cm. And my enlarged lymph nodes had got smaller too.

Really pleased doesn't cover it. That's significant shrinkage. That's the disease moving in the right direction in a meaningful way. She delivered it without emotion, as if it were just another data point. I was absolutely ecstatic on the inside.

The question I'd been building up to ask

But I hadn't just gone in there for the scan results. I'd gone in with an intention — to have a conversation that most people in my position might avoid. About the future. About actual numbers.

All I'd ever been told was "several years." No fixed timeframe, no clarity, nothing to plan around. I was a year into treatment, I'd been responding well, and I needed more than that. So I asked her directly — given how I've responded, and given the data on other people on this drug combination, what am I actually looking at?

Seventy five percent. The 25% who don't make it are typically people who have to come off the drugs due to severe side effects, or who choose to stop treatment. She even said — without me prompting it — that she wouldn't be surprised if I was still here in ten years, given my age and how I'd responded.

The whole family was ecstatic. And it genuinely was great news. The best news we'd had since this all began.

The seesaw

But here's the part I want to be honest about, because I think it matters.

In the days after the appointment, I was up and down in a way I didn't fully anticipate. I played it down to people around me — didn't want to make a big thing of it, didn't want to get anyone's hopes up or down. But inside, the emotions were doing something more complicated.

Because there's a moment when the initial elation fades and reality walks back in through the door. And reality says — hang on. You're celebrating the fact that you might die in ten years. Ten years. You're 46. That's not what celebrating should feel like.

I sat with that for a few days. The see-saw of it. The genuine joy and the equally genuine grief, both present at the same time. I'm not sure that ever fully goes away. I'm not sure it should.

But I'm back on an even keel now. Living life, not overthinking it, not measuring it. Just getting on with it — which has always been my way.

So what caused the shrinkage?

Here's the question I keep coming back to. The drugs have been doing their thing throughout — that's clearly part of it, and I'm not dismissing that for a second. But the one significant thing I had changed in the three months before this scan was the daily meditation. Three months of it, without missing a day, focusing directly on the tumour and the affected areas.

Was it the drugs? Was it the meditation? Was it the combination of everything — the diet, the exercise, the alcohol gone, the processed food gone, the meditation added? I honestly don't know. I can't know. No one can tell me definitively.

What I do know is this. I'm going to keep doing everything I'm doing. The drugs, the diet, the movement, the reflexology, the meditation. All of it. Because whatever the combination is — it appears to be working.

And that's enough for me.

— Nick