How do I know whether or not I'm making progress?

I just know. The same way I knew I had cancer a couple of months before the actual diagnosis. (This is not terribly impressive since the cancer has likely been growing in there for 10-12 years.) I think it's pretty much gone now, but my body is still a long way from being healthy (i.e., the fibroid cysts are shrinking, but still very much present), so my work isn't finished yet.

I had initially planned to have another mammogram in six months (which would be January '14), but since then, my research has made that seem like a bad idea. You see, mammograms pack 100 (or, some articles say 1,000) times the radiation of a chest xray, so voluntarily doing that to myself seems pretty silly just to prove a point. Also, mammograms aren't definitive because they can only detect tumors that are already 1-5 billion cells big.

But then . . .

I accidently heard about something called "Thermography." It uses an infrared camera to take pictures of the heat emanating from the body. Cancer cells divide much faster than normal cells, so they put off more heat -- show up "hotter." And get this -- It picks up cancer ten years (10!) sooner than mammograms or CT scans!  AND there's no radiation involved.  So why are mammograms still so prevalent? No idea. I suppose, like most things, it has do with money.

Anyway, I finally found someone who does thermography here in Bozeman, so I got my pictures taken a few days ago. Have to wait two weeks for the report, but it looked pretty good to my untrained eye.  We'll see what the experts have to say. Have an awesome week, y'all!