Just AJ

I attended a workshop called Poetry as a Coping Tool: How Writing Can Help with Kelsey Bigalow. She introduced erasure poetry or blackout poetry where you take a document and delete words until you are left with…something. I tried this with my lab report from my lung biopsy after my diagnosis: 03/15/24Right Lower LobeLUNGgrowing noduleSpecimen Collectedatypical cellsMARKEDLY ATYPICALpositiveDIAGNOSISMUCINOUS ADENOCARCINOMAMUCINOUS ADENOCARCINOMAMUCINOUS ADENOCARCINOMA I like how it sort of tells a story of diagnosis, from finding the nodule to collecting the biopsy, to finding out what it is.Read More →

I spent the past three weeks since diagnosis in a holding pattern. Each day, I make phone calls, I wait for records and wait for imaging and wait for one doctor’s office to call another. I wait each day for the thoracic surgeon’s office from Cleveland Clinic to call and let me know they reviewed the records, they looked at the imaging studies, and they contacted the offices and it’s time to make the appointment. But the day they contact me doesn’t come. I fill my time with gardening, cleaning, audiobooks, and sewing. Cleveland Clinic originally told me one week until they scheduled the appointment with theRead More →

It has been years since I’ve posted, but it is time to pull out the old blog because I have news – and not the good kind. I had a lung nodule show up on a CT for kidney stones in 2019. It wasn’t thought to be much of anything, but it kept growing so it was finally decided to do a biopsy to check what it was. However, they ended up finding out that I have lung cancer. Usually this type of thing isn’t caught until it is stage III or IV when it has grown significantly or has spread to other parts ofRead More →