Saying hello, and unexpected worries

Hey, everyone! I haven't been posting quite as much the past few weeks but I've been here every day. :-) I just wanted to check in to say hi and see how everyone is doing!

I'm doing better, for the most part. I still have a little trouble swallowing, but my saliva is a bit better and I think my taste is too. I've started my new job and it's going well so far. I like our new apartment, I like LA, and my boyfriend and I are getting out to do more things. One of the goals with the move was to exercise more so we picked an apartment that's walking distance to my office. My boyfriend was skeptical... but so far I've kept my committment to walk every day! I have my first appointment with the new oncologist here in LA on 3/25, so I'm planning to ask then about my next scan, etc.

I left my old job because I felt like I was working on the wrong kind of games. It's probably a subject no one here would care much about so I won't go into detail (unless you play a lot of video games), but I decided to speak out about it. A part of the reason I changed my outlook was the fact that I went through cancer treatments, so that became a part of the article I wrote. It went up on the main game development website (Gamasutra) on Monday. I was super nervous because it's about a controversial subject to begin with and it also was being very public (within my very small industry) about going through cancer treatments. So far the feedback has been positive, which was a big relief! Here's a link, although the subject matter is probably pretty dry for folks not in this line of work. :-) The Metrics Aren't The Message

Even with all of the positive news, I have the same worrying problem we all do. This is girl talk, so guys, feel free to skip over this bit! I took antibiotics for that chest infection/cold thing a couple weeks ago, and about four days ago I noticed I was super itchy and swollen in a specific area. I've had a yeast infection before (so I KNOW what they feel like). I was the Thrush Queen during treatments (so I KNOW my friendly bacteria is really out of balance). I had a prescription for single-day diflucan accidently prescribed by my old ENT instead of the right prescription for a previous case of thrush, so I filled it and took it. When it wasn't better just two days later, I had a panicked two hours of reading about how HPV can cause all kinds of cancers for women and one of the main symptoms for a specific kind of cancer is itching. I finally talked myself into calming enough to sleep, and got more OTC medication the next day. If it's not better in a couple more days, I'll make an appointment at the OB/GYN. None of that stops the nagging worry at the back of my brain, even though I KNOW BETTER.

At any rate, I've read about folks worrying about scans and symptoms over the past few days, so I figured I would chime in and let you know you're not alone and it's not weird. If itching down south can make me worry about throat cancer coming back, y'all should feel like it's normal to worry about symptoms in your throat. ;-)