Somewhat Nervous UPDATED

Well, after two months of insurance related hell (Fight the power that be! WOOT! Idiots. Every single last one of them.), I have finally been approved and scheduled to have the Pet/CT Scan which should prove, once and for all, that I'm cancer-free.

Dr. Academic wanted me to have this done in the middle of September, a month after finishing chemo. Because of the aforementioned insurance related hell, I'm just getting around to having it now, almost three months after finishing chemo.

And I'm suddenly nervous as all get out.

I know why this is. I think most rational people could figure it out and it's, obviously, that I'm afraid the cancer is still there, despite the results of somewhere around ten different CA-125 tests that show precisely the opposite. I'm lucky. CA-125 works for me. It doesn't work for 20% of women, who could, quite literally, have a cancerous cyst on their ovary that's roughly the size of a football and the test would still show a number in the normal range. God only knows what size of a hissy fit I would have worked myself up to by now if I couldn't rely on the CA-125 results. But, since my appointment is in a couple of hours, well, I'm just starting to work myself up now.

I don't know what to think about this. It should confirm what Dr. Academic has been telling me all along: That they got all of the cancer in the surgery and that I'm cancer-free. We may not know the how or why I came to be an ovarian cancer patient in the first place, but that, I've found doesn't really matter. Particularly when there's the now to be dealt with. Where am I now? Is the cancer gone? Like I've been told repeatedly. Or is it back? Has it been there all along? Did the chemo work as promised? Or has it, perhaps, gone someplace else? What, precisely, will this scan show? Will it pick it up at all if it's back? It's scary shit, my devoted Cake Eater readers. And I won't know the results for another week and a half, because that's the earliest I could get an appointment to see Dr. Academic.

There are all these variables running around in my head. Telling me not to think about it is about as futile as telling a hamster to get off the wheel. It's just not going to happen. I know I shouldn't be worrying about it. That everything is as Dr. Academic has told me repeatedly. That I'm just, per usual, making a mountain out of a molehill. Sigh. It's just that they said it wasn't anything the first time around. And it was something. A very serious something. It's a fine line to walk. I want to believe them, but a part of me is sounding the alarm bells, telling me not to until all the evidence is in. That I'll just be setting myself up for further heartbreak if I do believe their positive prognosis, and the results come in stating the opposite.

There is one thing I shall be paying a great deal of attention to today, however, is the reaction of the people working there. You see, when I was in the ER, and they gave me a CAT scan and an ultrasound, well, the behavior of the people running the scans changed dramatically over the course of the scans. They'd be friendly one minute, then the next, when the size of the problem was apparent, they'd clam up. The CAT scan people weren't too bad, but you could definitely sense an attitude adjustment in the air. The lady who did the ultrasound, however, was as chatty as could be and then she completely shut up. Not a peep left her mouth. She didn't even want to tell me I was done. She simply covered me up and arranged for transport. The ER nurse, too, kept shooting me meaningful glances, like she was trying to tip me off to just how serious this was, despite what the doctors had told me. I, of course, noted all of this at the time, but refused to pay any attention to it because it went against my general world view that everything was going to be just fine. I'm determined not to make the same mistake again. I will be watching them like a hawk. And if, for instance, they're having a bad day and just aren't feeling particularly chatty in the first place, well, I'll undoubtedly make a lot of it.

Sigh.

But, right now, all I want to do is eat lunch. You can't have food four hours before the scan, so despite having a large bowl of oatmeal (with raisins!) for breakfast, I'm now very, very hungry. It's time to get this crap over with.

Mainly because I want to eat something.

The Post-Scan Update

Well, all things considered, there are worse ways to spend an afternoon. Like sitting in a recliner, hooked up to an IV at the oncologist's office.

Here's where the scan was done. If you've got some time to blow take a virtual tour of the office. This was, by leaps and bounds and the occasional skip-to-my-lou, the swankiest office I've been in since this whole thing started. The oncologist's office is, well, serviceable. That's the nicest way to decribe it. My OB-GYN is in the same building as the Pet Scan place and I thought their office was nice. It's nothing compared to the Pet Scan place. It's like the difference between the furniture outlet and the Henredon showroom. Suddenly, it makes an awful lot of sense why these things are $1700 a pop.

The process was fairly routine. I was quickly ushered into a plush waiting room, with a leather recliner (take that, you cheap oncologists! Vinyl. PAH!) where the nurse quizzed me about all the drugs I was on, had taken in the past couple of months, and about the chemo, etc. She then started an IV, but there wasn't a drip involved, thankfully; she simply brought out this two-inch-wide, five-inch-long, steel encased syringe and shot the radioactive sugar solution (FDG) into it. After that, she handed me a glass of what looked like Milk of Magnesia (berry flavored!) and a small bottle of water for a chaser and told me to drink up. This was the contrast. Between the two of them, they would light my innards up like a pinball machine visible from space.

I had to sit around for forty-five minutes, to allow these two things to start flowing through my body, and then it was time for the scan. The PET scan machine looked exactly like House's MRI of Doom, only bigger and with a longer table. I laid down, put my arms up around my ears and they ran me in and out of the donut portion for the better part of a half-hour. I almost fell asleep. It was so very quiet. No thunking. No bells. No whistles. Nothing. Just a light mechanical purr. With this they can see if there's any cancer left, because the cancer cells will feast on the FDG, which is partially a simple sugar solution, and it'll show. They apparently can stage cancer with this puppy by watching just how fast the sugar is metabolized by the cancer cells. Which, is pretty cool, particularly when they usually have to figure that out via surgery. It can even differentiate between malignant and benign tumors, and it'll pick up any cancer recurrence more quickly than a blood test.

When it was over with, I, of course, paid particular attention to how the nurse was acting. She was the same after as she'd been before. I said, "I almost hate to ask, but how did it look?" She replied, "I have no idea. The computer is still processing the images. "

Duh.

Posted by Kathy at November 7, 2007 11:47 AM | TrackBack