Lindsay McDonell: When the Cancer Comes Roaring Back

How to deal with a potential recurrence after a period of kind-of-sort-of stability

This post was originally posted on Lindsay’s Facebook page ›

January 13, 2023

I opened the email with my monthly blood lab results. My tumor markers doubled from 33 to 70 in a month. So much for stable.

For the last seven years, my CA 27-29 tumor markers have been in the normal range: under 38. Before that when I was at my sickest, they were much much higher. As I got better, they got lower. They bump around a couple of points in the normal range at every monthly blood test. They seem to be an accurate indicator as to what’s going on in my stable cancer-full-to-the-brim body.

Last week, for whatever reason, my tumor markers doubled. And I got scared and I got sad. I immediately started thinking about what I needed to do to get out of this potential recurrence. 

In my coaching practice, I often tell people that if they get bad news, they need to sit with it for a couple of days. To just spend some time feeling. Feeling the fear, feeling the distress, feeling the “Oh geez, I don’t want to go through this again.” Only then can we move forward with a clearer head, because while we’re in fear, it completely crushes our curiosity and inner power. I invite people to just sit and get their feet back under them. It’s not comfortable, but I find it necessary. 

I suggest to my clients that they:

1. Feel the shock: cancer sucks and you’re allowed to feel sucky.
2. Don’t try to figure anything out: we can’t predict the future.
3. Look at yourself to figure out what you need to feel better emotionally: determine what you need right now. Is it a friend? Solitude? Binge-watching your favorite movies?
4. Acclimate to your new surroundings: spend this time to get over the jumping-into-the-freezing-lake feeling so that you can start to doggy paddle.

Once we’ve acclimated to our news a bit, we can start to participate with our doctors and with ourselves.

So I spent the next few days just sitting. I told some friends, but I tried not to think about what my blood results really meant because there’s no way I could know. And after a few days, I went into action. I asked for all the scans that I could have—a bone scan, CT, MRI, and a PET scan— so we could figure out why my tumor markers had doubled. And we did them this week. Having a plan B is what I needed to get through this emotionally, so I also found a clinic in Germany that I could visit if it was the worst possible news and I felt that I needed more than what my American hospital could provide.

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