Yesterday was supposed to be my first day of chemo. The port was placed in me on Wednesday morning, the ultrasound echiocardiogram done right after (apparently the best output reading of a heart this tech has seen is 75 and I'm a 70 - yeah, heart). Testing done, ready to go.
I get to the chemo facility at 9am and vitals taken. My friend Lisa is with me for this first servicing, so we're then led into the private room where the nurse can go over the details of chemo with me. At that point I'm summoned to the nurse's station for a phone call. It is the nurse practictioner from my oncologist's office. She's telling me we won't be starting chemo today, that they found areas on the bone and liver in the bone scan and CT with contrast done on Tuesday -- they just got the results that morning. She's asking me to drive north to Sibley Hospital to come in an talk with the doctor (the doctor splits her time between Sibley and GWUH). I break into sobs. Sobs, I'm telling you sobs.
All through this experience I have felt angry, scared, and confused but never hopeless. At this point I felt hopeless. Through my sobs I try and ask questions. "Where are the spots? How big are they?" She tells me she doesn't have the report. What? WTF? She can't give me details but she can tell me this shit has spread.
She keeps telling me to drive up to Sibley to meet with the doctor, a 30 to 40 minutes drive on freeway that I would do while wildly upset. I refuse. I say I have no one to drive (my friend Lisa can't drive) and I can't be on a freeway in this condition. She tells me there will be more tests. I beg her to get them set up asap, I ask if there is anything I can do to get these tests scheduled. She says no. Wait. It's always waiting. She tells me to go home and the doctor will call me there.
I go back into the secluded room and sob more and more, nurses and social workers coming in to try and comfort me. In my head I'm splitting up my household and finalizing details. After I calm down enough to walk, Lisa and I head back to my house to await the doctor's call. We wait for several hours.
The minute my nephew and his wife arrive at my house, having just flown in from Wisconsin (God bless them), the doctor calls. She has a much better approach then her nurse practictioner. She tells me the spots on the bones are on the right back ribs and could be simple degeneration (old lady bones). They'll do a spine MRI to rule cancer out there and she's not so worried about those.
The mass on the liver she is concerned about. I tell her that I had just had a CT with contrast on my abdomen in September 2011 because they had seen spots on my liver when they'd done an ultrasound for possible gallstones. That test showed these to be benign hemangiomas (old lady liver). Oh, she says, can you get those films so we can compare with the latest scans? If they haven't grown, we're less concerned, but we'll still do an MRI of the liver. I tell her that she can stick me into any machine she wants for testing, I will happily go. The first nephew duty Josh performs is to drive me to pick up films and then drop them off at GWUH radiology. God bless nephew.
I also email my fabulous friend at the National Cancer Institute, Nico, and he tells me that bone metastasese tend to go to the arms, legs and pelvis, not ribs. And that comparing the CT's will tell us much. Again, I love that man. I've told several that I will marry him or give him free sex, but apparently he is gay. I then offered to find him a boyfriend. He already has a lovely partner. I'm lost with what to do for him at this point. I owe him my sanity. Perhaps I can clean their lovely house for the rest of my days. Whatever he wants, he's got it.
The good news? It sounds like I still might get to live. So if you all were thinking of what you'll get after I die, back off suckas.
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