I had my 6 monthly PET scan yesterday. Aside from some drama associated with accessing my chemo port, it all went fine. I find it so surprising that more people aren't trained on port access at places that service a lot of cancer patients. Crazy that I lost sleep last night worrying that the nurse at the nuclear medicine facility forgot to inject Heparin into the port at the end of the procedure. Anyone with a port will understand my concern.
I get the results today at 3pm and I confess the anxiety is getting the better of me, though I think I'm succeeding in not making this obvious to most around me.
Not much to say about it right now, but just so you understand the mental gymnastics I'm doing right now, you need to realise there is actually a fairly broad spectrum of options.
Obviously, if they find nothing it would be an amazing reprieve that would buy me another 3 clear months of runway (we are moving to 3 monthly scans from the current 6 monthly cycle after this given my high risk for recurrence). However I'm actually really worried about a scenario like middle ground (B) above, because it means I can't act decisively, but instead my general quality of life will just take a significant hit, as juggling personal and work life becomes even harder.
Anyway….I figure it's not worth thinking too much about until I know the outcome. So, fingers crossed.
While I was locked in the radiation room yesterday for an hour (you’re not allowed to do anything in that time, even read) I did some thinking and I've decided I want to devote more energy to lobbying. There are so many things that I think are really unfair for terminally ill people, largely because - for obvious reasons - they don't have a political voice. I've written before about how I feel on the issue of assisted dying, but there are a litany of other issues pissing me off right now - tax on life insurance, the inability to treat major medical expenses as a tax deduction (you can tell I've just done my tax returns), the way Medicare billing works etc, etc.
But I'll shut up for now.