Joyce Joyce

For simplicity, we will continue to post updates on the CaringBridge website moving forward. You can follow along here. You can also use that site to get emails whenever we post updates: https://www.caringbridge.org/site/7c638837-9e1f-11ef-94d0-75298f405790

  Friends, thank you for your continued and renewed prayers as our family navigates next steps in cancer treatment. I returned to Mayo for 3 days for several follow up studies and visits with specialists. We have good news including normal basic lab work, so oncologists can throw whatever they want at me. We have a stable brain MRI (the best news of all to me), and a PET/CT confirming evidence of cancer progression that seems limited to some “rouge” areas of the spine ONLY.    I am thankful that no activity was seen in the lungs, lymph nodes, other organs or bones. Bones are generally easy to target with radiation by our brilliant radiation oncologists. So, we plan to radiate those “hot” areas of the spine. I will get technical here – we are going after T12-L2 which light up clearly in the photo. There is question of mild activity a bit higher at the T2 spinous process but that also has a fracture that may be healing to explain the finding and, more importantly, T2 was al...

Friends, it is with an extremely heavy heart that I share this news. My MRI shows 3, possibly 4, spots on my thoracic spine where cancer has progressed through selpercatinib treatment. Each site was where there had been known spread when I was initially diagnosed. We don’t know why things are progressing at these sites.    Plausible explanations include the drug may not have been able to penetrate those affected areas well, the cancer may have developed another RET mutation (RET is the target for selpercatinib), there may have been another non-RET mutation acquired by the cancer to bypass the drug, or maybe something else.     Progression with selpercatinib treatment was something we knew could happen and had seen other patients with RET cancers develop. After all, the landmark clinical trial of this drug had demonstrated a median duration of 2 years of progression-free survival for people like me. So while we are not completely shocked, I was just really hoping we’d...

  It’s a question that I have been asked more than any other in the past three months, and there is never enough time to unpack the complexity of the answer. As is my custom, I will do my best to accurately represent the details of our situation through a movie reference. “Wyatt, I am rolling” is one of my favorite lines delivered by Val Kilmer in his brilliant portrayal of Doc Holliday in the movie “Tombstone.” I can’t think of a better way to summarize the life of Joyce Sanchez at this precise moment in time. During the past month, she has spent three nights a week at the climbing gym “sending it” even on advanced routes of 5.10a (Yosemite Decimal System). One weekend we spent the morning taking in the spectacular views from the Lookout Express chairlift on a Bluebird Day before catching up with the Sun Valley Music Festival where guest pianist Joyce Yang performed some of the most inspiring compositions by Sergei Rachmaninoff.    To top that, she scaled the harrowing A...

  Thank you for your prayers and messages of encouragement these past 4 weeks. God in His grace has answered those prayers. My presumably inflammatory migratory joint pain has resolved on its own and my sight returned to just about normal within 3 days of a 2-week course of steroid eyedrops followed by a 1-week wean from those drops.    So for now, I’m to remain on lubricating eye drops indefinitely to stave off any irritation to the cornea from dry eye, which I might have long-term. As for the next steps in my health journey, I continue to tolerate Selpercatinib “Super Cat Nip” for the lung cancer. My post-radiation numbness/tingling in the legs with chin-tuck hasn’t gotten much better but it also hasn’t gotten any worse and I can certainly live with that. I will be asking for an assessment of new mid-spine pain (around T11-T12) that started about 3 weeks ago, got worse last week, and unfortunately hasn’t improved at all, unlike all the other joints which have stopped hu...

  Hi, friends! Several have asked how things have been going, so here is an update on the last three weeks. The good news is I met a wonderful physical therapist who immediately connected with me, as we share a lot in common. She gave me practical strengthening exercises to target my neck, upper back and core. Many of these exercises involve cable weight machines which we don’t have at home. But I was encouraged to find that our local climbing gym has most of the equipment. As the kids are already at the climbing gym 3x/week for their climbing class/team, David nudged me to get my own membership. Considering the value of time with family, improving my strength and having a fun place to invite people, I said yes and am so glad I did. I’m only about 10 days into this, so I can’t say there have been any dramatic changes to my neurologic symptoms, but I haven’t noticed any more tingling in my fingers and hope to see improvement in my neck-related symptoms over the next few weeks. A mor...

  Hi, friends. First, please know that this post won’t be about anything sinister, at least I don’t anticipate this to be. But it  is  an update for those who have been asking how things have been going since our last report of my cancer’s excellent response to treatment. In summary, these are good days, but dang are there still hard days, too! About 2 weeks ago, I experienced numbness and tingling in my fingers. Because I had recently started a new medication, I thought it could be a rare side effect from it and, after discussion with my oncologist, we elected to hold it to see if it would resolve. The numbness seemed to improve but didn’t completely resolve. It was quite minimal, and we just had good news from my scans, so I figured time would either resolve it or declare if we needed to do anything more. A week later, I experienced a shooting numbness and tingling sensation on my upper legs occurring whenever I flexed my neck (when you put your chin to your chest). Tur...

  Today we received very, very, very good news. Six weeks into treatment with Selpercatinib (including holding it for several days from side effects, then reintroducing and increasing it over 4 weeks, at what seemed like a  snail’s  pace to me), my PET/CT scan yesterday showed  NO  areas that lit up as metabolically active cancer. “Completely resolved.” Nothing lit up in my lungs (where it all started). Nothing lit up in my chest nor neck lymph nodes (where we biopsied to find out this was lung cancer). Nothing lit up in any of my many, many affected bones, including the spine where the pain had been most severe in November. My brain MRI showed that the 4 tiny spots that were suspected to be metastases and had been treated with gamma knife radiation have either “resolved completely” or have shrunk even tinier than the tiny size they had been. For those who are medically inclined or interested in the before/after images of the PET/CT, you can see them in the post...