Negative Signatera

The best “nothing” I’ve ever gotten

Today I got the news I’ve been obsessively waiting on for the past three weeks—the kind of obsessive where you refresh the results portal 97 times a day. My first Signatera test came back negative.

NEGATIVE. As in: no detectable circulating tumor DNA in my bloodstream. As in: nothing. Nada. Zero evil microscopic cancer cells floating around in there trying to kill me.

I got this test after my surgery but before I started chemo, so what this means—at least as of three weeks ago, when the blood was drawn—is that surgery successfully removed all traces of cancer.

I didn’t expect to get the results on a random Saturday morning. I was in bed, doomscrolling like any normal person in a chemo fog, when I saw the notification. There it was: NEGATIVE. I stared at the word so long I thought I might be hallucinating. Then I screamed. Then I cried. Then I started texting people in all caps.

Of course, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. This doesn’t mean I’m cured, or done, or suddenly allowed to stop taking 47 pills a day. It just means things are going well. Depending on what studies and stats you look at, 2-15% of people with my exact situation (my specific staging with a negative test) have a recurrence, which is both reassuring and…not zero. And I’m only one round into four rounds of chemo, so the toxic joyride continues.

Whether chemo actually helps when your Signatera is already negative is complicated. The science is still catching up, but the current standard of care is “keep going,” so I am. I’ll be getting the Signatera blood test every three months, along with occasional CT scans, colonoscopies, and whatever other delightful procedures the cancer follow-up industrial complex can bill me for.

But for now, this is a very good thing. This is the first concrete, data-backed sign that the surgery completely did its job. That I don’t have cancer in my body right now. That we are, in fact, moving toward remission.