It's been a long time in coming, but I've finally had a week with some really good news. Since restarting chemo earlier this month, instead of dropping, my tumor marker continued to rise.

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The tumor marker is measured in the blood and is an indication of whether or not the chemo is working. If the chemo is working, the tumor marker goes down, meaning the cancer is being killed off.

Well, after three weeks of rising numbers, yesterday's test gave us the great news of a significant drop. Praise God!

Part of the reason I hadn't been too faithful writing this journal was because each week seemed to bring more bad news. It's hard to write when there's nothing positive to say.

Last week in our quest to determine the cause of my cough, a chest x-ray revealed more fluid on my right lung, and my pulmonologist drained a whole liter. It did improve my coughing, not to mention made me feel a whole lot lighter!

The week before that, tests were done that showed the cancer had spread to my bones. But good news also came from those tests in that the tumors that were radiated had shrunk significantly. Since radiation continues to work for a few weeks after treatments are completed, those tumors are likely gone by now. So we praise God for that! And today we are quite thankful to know that my body is responding to treatments.

The more of this I go through, the more I am in awe of how our bodies work. I had a test on my heart yesterday and got to see on a computer screen each of my heart valves pumping. I heard the blood flowing, and was just amazed at how intricately our bodies were created. I can't understand how people, especially those who work in medicine, can believe that it was all just a random process.

I've heard it said that the probability that life on this earth just happened randomly is about the same as that of a tornado being able to put together a 747 jet as it goes through a junkyard.

So, for this week, we have a lot to be thankful for. Until next time...

Pam Daale
The Happy Cancer Patient ... again

You can e-mail Pam Daale at Pam_Daale@TheDenverChannel.com.