I am back from the dead. This course of the chemo was just debilitating. I had thought this type was supposed to be not as bad. I guess they meant the nausea isn’t as bad, which is true. But the fatigue and pain was unbelievable. I still have the fatigue, which comes and goes. Yesterday, I didn’t feel that bad. Today, while not in the pain I was, I am more tired. Weird, huh?

I have a new hill to wait out until Wednesday.

Yesterday, I was at the doctor of the week, this week being the radiation oncologist. She was wonderful, she comes in and gives me a huge hug, none of this hand shaking for her. We begin discussing treatment, she is the localized treatment person as opposed to the medical oncologist who treats the entire body. She wanted to look at the pet scan that I had before I started chemo. After reading the original report from the original radiologist, she said there were some discrepancies.

Discrepancies? What does that mean? I have started becoming more fluent in “doctorese” and discrepancy probably is not a good thing.

The report says there is “some uptake in the bones” but no metastasis. Again, need definition. What does that mean? Well, the 2 statements are contradictory. There can not be uptake in the bones and not have metastasis. It there is something in the bones, then there is metastasis. We looked at the pet scan together and she showed me the places that were of concern to her. She says they could be arthritis and not be cancer at all, but she wants to make sure. So off to a bone scan on Tuesday.

The problem with this is how it changes my long term prognosis. I go to stage 4 and that 5 year survival rate is not as good. So, I am hanging on to the fact that the doctor is more than 80% sure that it is all ok.

So next week looks like this:
Monday - meeting with my medical oncologist to discuss how much more chemo I need. It will take quite a bit of persuasion to hook me up again.

Tuesday - go to St. Lukes at 8 am to be injected with some kind of dye in the nuclear medicine department. I go away for 2 hours and come back for the scan. I take away the disc and take it to my radiation oncologist.

Wednesday - Off to the surgeon to discuss when I chop these puppies off and get the results from the bone scan. (The office of the radiation oncologist is in with the surgeon.)

So big week planned.

You know I think this part is harder on Scott. His mother had breast cancer and it came back in her back. She eventually died from bone cancer. I know this was difficult for him to hear and I think it freaked him out just a little bit. But, we are trying to stay positive, because there is nothing I can do about it now.

I’ll let you know.