Yesterday I went for the bone scan. I already knew the drill: come in for the injection of radioactive tracer fluid (say it with me, just in case I didn’t already have cancer) wait an hour, and then lie still while a giant waffle-maker transmits images of my skeleton to a computer screen. I confess I like the bone scan. It is cool to see your own skeleton from head to toe. It’s very sci-fi. Plus it doesn’t hurt.
Unfortunately I have to wait until Monday for my CT scans, and even then we've asked my oncologist to get all the results before telling us what (if anything) these tests turn up. So, likely end of next week sometime, we will know what we’re facing.
I’m trying to approach the CT scans and bone scan realistically. My strategy is to assume that something will turn up somewhere; that in all likelihood, given that I found the lump in my neck because it was protruding, there will be things (lesions, tumours, groups of evil, hateful, unwelcome cells) in places I can’t feel them. The idea is to be mentally prepared so that if absolutely nothing else should turn up (can you imagine the relief??) I can celebrate, but if they find something I will have been expecting it.
Basically it’s a nice theory, but in practice it’s BS. The truth is I’m scared. When I'm not totally distracted by something else, I’m living in dread. So I’m actually relieved that I have several more days to try to get my head around it, and even then I think it’s a tall order.
On the up-side, the clinical trial nurse called today to tell me that they have a place for me in the study! Now I just have to go through the whole screening process and actually qualify as a subject… Yes, more testing. That's just my life right now, but if it means I'm going to have a chance at beating this thing, I'm ok with it.
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