Tuesday, March 1, 2011

'I Am A Full Positive Receptor' - Though The Reception Will Be Held At A Later Date!

Setbacks! Nothing that a little Lorazepam and a few glasses of wine won't fix! Normally abusing drugs isn't my style, but sometimes having a band-aid for the hurt is the right thing to do.

I had passed all my preliminary tests for the Interleukin 2. Maybe the colors weren't flying all that high, but they were flying high enough to for me to be O.K.'d for the treatment. The real problem is they don't have room for me in the ICU until Monday the 14th. That's a two week wait! I'm drumming my fingers!

Yesterday, after waiting the hour+ to speak to the oncologist, he asks me what I know about the treatment and what I expect. I tell him the horrible things I've read on the internet, hoping that he will debunk them as being misinformed scaremongering collected from disreputable sources. But instead he nods his head almost as if he isn't listening to me, but going over a song he's learning the drum part to inside his head. I'm expecting him to shoot down all my misconceptions, but the only thing he nips in the bud is my plan to eat Manuka Honey while I'm in the hospital. It's a raw unpasteurized thing, so I can only use it before and after the treatment ,but not during. Rightly so, it might compromise my immune system.

Meanwhile Doc. Onc. is getting the results up on the screen as I drag my chair around. I look over the results of the test with him, practically perched on his shoulder. I'm about to ask him about the new nodes on the lungs and I make a gesture in that general area coming to a full stop on my right clavicle. And he says "Oh! Yes, Yes! I forgot the right clavicle!" I was so confused! I said,"What? You say there's a spot on my Clavicle?!" I immediately  felt pain surging through my right clavicle  in both directions, up my neck and over my shoulder! He quickly wheeled his finger over the mouse till he landed on a black, white and gray image of my chest and clavicle bones. Yup! There it was, white light glaring in my eyes, looking like a blob that oozed out of a grilled cheese. The pain got more intense, then Dan reminded me of the strain I incurred earlier that day dragging my purse from the back seat of the car up to the front seat. It still hurts. Doc. Onc. says it's nothing  to worry about, it may not be cancerous; it could be an anomaly in the scan. What does he know?! I'm worried.

On the MRI the spots on my lungs are not the Jackson Pollock sputters I saw on the PET scan - I wasn't supposed to look at them on the PET scan. There are two nodes, one for each lung that have grown from 3 mm to 6mm. They're located on the MRI, not on the PET that I looked at - Do I look like a doctor?! So, luckily that's just a case of me freaking myself out while my surgeon was on holiday in Argentina; and not able to give his interpretation. A vacation rightly deserved - he works too hard and too long - and god-bless his assistant who works longer hours than he does! She tried to talk some sense in me over the phone about the splatters on the PET, but she probably didn't know what I was on about with the painting references I was giving her.

So lucky me, I now get to wait two weeks. Well, in the meantime I can eat my Manuka Honey, learn how to do yoga in a bed, train my mind to focus away from pain and my uncomfortableness, and wait for my Anti-Cancer book to come in the mail.

Dan and I will have the time to make a small escape from the house and go to the beach to relax. I haven't been out of the house much since December.  There I can forget that I cried in heaving grief over the fact that I couldn't start this horrible process sooner.

The heading of this passage could have been alternately titled with the old slogan, "Patience is a virtue!"

"Nothing happens before it's time!"

"All good things come to he who waits!"

"Little drops of water wear down big stones"

"A handful of patience is worth more than a bushel of brains."

"Never run after a bus, there will always be another one!"

"Never run in front of a bus either!"

You get it... Et cetera!

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