A week since I last posted - time does pass. I've been busy with work, as usual, but also fighting a cold - a fight I may have (knock on wood) won. Still a little strange to feel "sick" and have it be "normal." I also may have put off posting since I saw Dr. M on Monday because of some sort of weird news.
He said my exam was good (he does the "internal" exam), and pronounced me doing well, etc. etc. As far as my CT scan results - I told him that Dr. R said "Great scan." He said, "Really?" and went on to say it WAS a good scan, but... And the "but" related to something I can't recall now whether I posted about here months and months ago when I had the first CT scan way back before the surgery. But I don't think I did write about it here. When I had that CT scan back in mid-October and I went to see him for my "meet and greet" and initial exam before the surgery, he told me that besides showing "my" tumor, the CT scan showed a very tiny lesion in one of my lungs (I forget which one). He said the radiologist who "read" the CT scan did not believe it was malignant; he thought it likely was scarring from an infection or something like that. At any rate, the "lesion" was so small, nothing could be done about it (like a biopsy). So Dr. M said that while he agreed with the radiologist, he also thought it should be kept an eye on. In the meantime, since I had an actual visible and troublesome tumor freaking me out -- I decided to limit my "worrying" to that, and not deal with the tiny "lesion" that was too small to do anything about. Time for that later, I thought.
Months pass. Chemo. Radiation. More chemo Time comes for another CT scan. Back to see Dr. M.
Now comes the "weird" thing. He said this new CT scan no longer shows the lung lesion. The good news is - it no longer shows the lung lesion. The bad - or at least mysterious - news is - it no longer shows the lung lesion. Does that mean that the "chemo" caused it to shrink/disappear? If so, does that mean it was in fact cancerous? Dr. M said it is a mystery and since it is now gone, what it was will remain a mystery. He did say it could have disappeared for reasons other than having been cancer. (David - who worked with imaging equipment for decades in Mass hospitals - thinks that the first CT scan could have had an anomaly, given how "tiny" it was, maybe it was an artifact of the scan itself).
Thinking about it does freak me out a little bit. Any kind of cancer is freaky and fearsome enough, but lung cancer is - for me at least - the most fearsome of all. In the end, however, when it was visible, the lung lesion was too small to biopsy, so there was nothing to be "done" about it except to "watch" - so even then, it was a mystery. Now it is disappeared, vanished, gone. A mystery. But - my lungs are clear! I think it is better to be faced with "keeping an eye" on clear lungs than with "keeping an eye" on something - a tiny lesion of unknown origin - showing up in one of them, wondering what it is. At least, that's my story and I'm sticking to it!
That's all the cancer news, kids, except June 5th is approaching - and that's when I'm walking in the Connecticut Komen Race for the Cure for breast cancer. A number of my co-workers have pledged to support me - very generously I must say - another astounding piece of news to me. The fact that people would pledge at all is wonderful, but that they would do so in very generous amounts is just amazing.
Jessie and I made it to the park this morning, but it was 6:10 or so - late for us. The sun was up and gleaming. We had a lovely walk on the first sort of warm morning in a while. Nice to walk in just a sweater, no coat. Lots of birds. Although their jumbled songs still sound to me like an orchestra warming up - I can recognize different songs but have no idea which song is which bird for most of them - I am beginning to be able to pick out certain birds' melodies, as if from the jumble of musical instruments warming up, a flute's notes jumped out individually. At least I recognize now that the "jumble" is actually the songs of many individual species/birds and not just cacophony.
I have registered with the National Audubon Society to go to the coast to help them in any way they need in the Mississippi River delta area. I have vacation coming and I figure I could take at least a week to go down and volunteer. So far they are only calling on volunteers from the region. I hope they do ask me to come, although it would be better if they didn't do so because they didn't need me.
Peace. But may BP go down to the bottom of the deepest trench in the ocean and rot there.
No comments:
Post a Comment