*I’m hitting “send” on this post without overthinking it鈥攊t’s straight from the heart, more like a diary entry than anything else. It’s raw and disjointed. It was a single post at one point, but I have now broken it into many so Shaylin doesn鈥檛 kill me.
Mentally, I’m soaring. Physically, I feel fantastic, and all my lab results are solid. I had a CT and Bone Scan last week and am bracing myself for the usual vague results next week. If history repeats itself, the CT will likely show “marked enhancement” in the right breast, a phrase that sounds important but just means a clump of cells is seen on the image. Based on the PET/CT, these aren’t metabolically active cancer cells. They are probably dead cells, and my immune system will take a while to clean up. As a result, they might as well say: “There’s a spot on the screen.” And that’s the frustrating part鈥攄ecisions about your treatment are based on the spot and whatever the radiologist feels about the spot that day. They don’t measure; they look and give their ‘expert opinion of the spot.’ And here I am, maintaining my cool every three months, waiting for someone to say, “Spot on screen, the spot looks bigger, the spot looks smaller, the spot is there still.” I get that they think I am a goner, but do they have to make it so apparent that they aren’t going to try at least to save me?聽 Or, god forbid, they give me enough information to try myself. Hence, my self-pay PET/CTs. I would even give up the medical systems CTs and Bone Scans to avoid chewing up the spots and to reduce the radiation exposure, but they don’t want me to do that. I can’t argue with everything they say, so I am stuck taking a valuable diagnostic opportunity away from someone who could otherwise benefit from it. And to quote all the world’s dictators, I will end by saying: “This would be so much easier if they just listened to me.” 馃檪