Former WESH anchor Wendy Chioji says “The Beast” she’s been fighting for years has “come roaring back.” Chioji first shared her battle with breast cancer while working at Orlando’s NBC affiliate in 2001, and underwent treatment again last fall for a fast-growing cancer of the thymus gland. She writes on her blog there’s a new threat, and “it just got more dramatic”:
As it did last fall, my MRI detected something suspicious. Small, but big enough for Dr. Shroff to pick up the phone. Yesterday’s CT scan confirmed: The cancer is back. Or maybe it never left. Maybe despite my miserable winter with radiation and chemo, The Beast was just lurking there, waiting for me to gain some traction in my life so it could come roaring back out.
There are 4-5 small tumors in my chest wall (could be worse… could be in my lungs. How ironic would that be, for me, ME, to get lung cancer?) that weren’t there in April. I only half-heard him say it then, but now, I vividly remember my Huntsman oncology quarterback, Dr Akerley telling me in October that if the radiation/chemo didn’t kill this cancer, that’s all he had up his sleeve. We were hoping the ghastly treatment would buy me more time, but it didn’t.
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Three weeks ago, everything was fine. Today, I’m looking for a Hail Mary pass. I’d say this is a fairly graphic illustration of the fact that you have to live EVERY day like it could be your last.