Update on my health

I’m doing well

It’s been a while since I’ve written on this platform. Please excuse my inconsistency. I’ve been attending to my health.

This post is a quick update about how I’m doing.

First off, I’m feeling pretty good. My palliative team has been helping me manage my pain pretty well. I’ve also working with a neurologist on my neuropathy issue in my feet and we seem to be making some progress.

Overall I am stable. I will have my next set of scans at the end of May.

Over the last year, my wife and I spent some time traveling to the top cancer centers in the country. We visited MSK in New York, and a last month we finally got to MD Anderson in Houston. We also had some consultations with other doctors in the Atlanta area.

Long story short, all the doctors seem to agree about my case. My case is extremely complicated. More than I realized or appreciated until now.

Surgical intervention isn’t a viable option for me either for the lung metastasis or the original tumor in the rectum. It’s just too risky and either surgery would result in an extremely painful recovery and possibly more serious complications than I have now.

After receiving feed back from MD Anderson, I decided that the risk isn’t worth it, so for now we content the current regimen which is chemotherapy every other week to control the cancer and prevent it from spreading.

Doctors still think this is the best way forward and believe that this will still give me a lot of good years ahead. Of course we are still leaving it on Gods hands.

Chemotherapy is hard on the body, so I have my days when I’m not feeling well, but those days are thankfully manageable.

I’m also working on some other health issues, one of which includes trying to return back to my normal weight. Because of the neuropathy on my feet, the constant use of steroids, and some emotional eating, I’ve gained nearly 70 pounds over the last four years.

Now that I’m making some progress with reducing the pain in my feet, I’ve been able to get more walking in daily and with a change in my eating habits, I’ve already lost 14 pounds. I’ll weigh in again tomorrow when I go to the clinic for chemotherapy.

Mentally, emotionally, and spiritually I feel pretty strong. I’ve been quite busy with speaking engagements both in person and virtual and that’s been great for morale. I just returned from Orlando where I had the honor of being the closing speaker at the Disability and The Church Conference. I’ll share more about my time there in another post.

Right now the family is doing well. We are preparing to send my mother in love back to Malawi in a few weeks. She’s been with us for a year now and we are going to miss her when she is gone.

I’ll be working on doing more writing in the future. Bear with me while I continue to navigate this cancer journey.

Thanks for your support and prayers.