Ever wondered what it feels like to go from week to week, month to month, wondering what is going on in your body with respect to cancer?
So far I have done a great job of ignoring it. I take my drugs, I try to treat my body well, I get rest and I stay positive.
It's all fairly easy for me to manage as I have a plan and stop thinking about it all. But after you get a cat scan, no matter how good of a job you are doing, all the question demons start to surface.
Is it growing? Is it receding? Am I on the right track?
And if something weird happens, like this morning I noticed a bunch of patches of weird skin thingy's - what is that? Or how come I am winded when I just walking up the stairs?
Stupid scan knocks me off my game.
On Friday I had a cat scan and had scheduled a meeting with Dr. R on May 17th to review the results. We actually had to work around our schedules as I am planning a sea kayak trip with my high school and University buddies leaving on the 18th. I figured positive or negative, a trip with my pals was the perfect way to process the answers.
Well, today I got a call from a nurse at the Tom Baker and after the hello's she asks "how are you feeling?".
Well if that isn't a gut punch of a question. You just know that she's not asking in the casual 'how's your day?' kinda way. She's asking cause she's staring at the results.
So when I respond with 'I'm fine - but your question leads me to believe I'm not fine, what's going on?' she kinda stalls and changes from a gut punch to an anxiety punch with "sorry but I am not at liberty to discuss'. Damned if that doesn't suck the wind out of your positive attitude.
I now have a meeting on Wednesday to discuss the results and subsequent plans with the oncologist. I have been given hints in this conversation that we may need to look at different drugs, may need a whole new plan...
So, this just happened an hour ago, it has of course knocked me off my autopilot and now I am looking at everything with a shorter timeline. Which is kinda good again, but at the same time who knows what this meeting is all about so I am not going to change too much.
What I am going to do is go upstairs and enjoy a pint cause my tastebuds don't suck as much as that conversation did.
Stand by folks - let's see what this all means.
Enjoy the two days while we pause for commercial break.