(Not actually a ninja. Though I do have a sword. And a bow and arrow. And I like dressing in black. So maybe there is a little bit of ninja in there.)

A lot of the experience of cancer is waiting. Waiting for a scan and then the results of the scan. Waiting for the next treatment, and then for that treatment to take effect. Waiting to see if the cancer has progressed, stalled, or retreated. Waiting across the span of weeks and months.

It might all be a bit annoying if I wasn’t used to being patient. Possibly more patient than I ought to be sometimes, but that’s a topic for another post.

When I was first diagnosed with lung cancer, some of the tumour samples were sent off for a trio of extra tests. These tests were looking for a specific mutation, ALK, that might open up other treatment options. Normally the chance of finding this mutation is pretty small, but I was already an edge case as a relatively youthful non-smoker, and the doctors figured my odds of having it were higher than normal. So they crossed their fingers and sent the samples off.

And then we waited.

Waited long enough that I had to make a decision on whether or not to start the standard chemotherapy course or wait for the test results. Deciding that punching the cancer in the face right away was the better option, I decided to go ahead, and the results of that you can read about in a preceding post.

The second course of chemo was due for yesterday, but it didn’t go ahead. Why not? Because the long-awaited test results came through, and they came through positive. Or mostly so—two out of three tests returned positive, and the third was ambivalent. My tumour was one of the rare ones with the ALK mutation, and that meant that a drug called Alectinib was now the preferred treatment option.

Why preferred? Well, beyond prospects for better results, Alectinib is delivered in pill form. Instead of going to the hospital every three weeks to have cytotoxic drugs dripped into my bloodstream, I get to go to the pharmacy and collect a box of pills, which I’ll take twice a day, with breakfast and dinner. Side effects too should be much milder, though everything to do with this kind of treatment is described in terms of percentages and I’ll have to wait and see what my percentile dice roll turns up.

As for treatment prospects, I’m still doing the reading and not getting too ahead of myself, but Alectinib does seem to offer a much better outlook than chemotherapy. The numbers for lung cancer are … not good, as a rule. The numbers for Alectinib specifically look better, with the caveat that this is a very new treatment. So new that they talk about two-year outcomes instead of five-year outcomes.

But I’m not getting too far ahead of myself on that score. This is probably the best news that I’ve had since my initial diagnosis, and if nothing else it means that I can live a much less restricted life than I was worried I might have to. One pill, twice a day, with fewer side effects than chemo? That’s something to be glad about.

Of course, this means that I’ll also be back to work before too long, and living something resembling a normal life. There’ll still be things to write about here, and I’m hardly going to be forgetting that I have cancer. There will be plenty of tests and results to wait for. I’m also giving serious thought to deleting my Facebook account, as I’ve already made the decision not to link any more posts from here to there.

For now though, I’ll take the win. More to see and more to do as the year comes in, but for now I’m in good form and hope you are too. Thanks for reading.