I crossed my fingers on Friday morning as I headed out the door to my first 3-month checkup. Yep, this was my first quarterly visit to my Oncologist post-treatment. Technically my appointment was planned for the 11th, but my doctor had to reschedule and pushed it to the 18th. Emergency surgery was the excuse. Since he's a doctor I guess I'll accept that as good reason to rearrange his patients. Obviously I knew the visit was “fast approaching” but had pushed it out of my mind for the past several months. Clearly an indication I’m either back in denial or I never left that stage. One of my friends had previously warned me that denial wasn’t a good long-term strategy and this would come to bite me in the butt. Sure enough, on the 11th I woke up with a hazy recollection that I had just experienced a very disturbing dream. In my dream I had various cancer-related symptoms that I certainly was not having in real life. I had to spend considerable mental energy ignoring my subconscious on the drive to work. I made it through my first meeting of the day and then was able to retrieve voicemail that informed me that my doctor wanted to push the whole thing off by another week. “Groan” I thought to myself… Or maybe it was “ugh!” The next week ended up being a complete distraction as the whole family came down with sundry illnesses one after the other including ear infections and the flu. So when I walked into my doctor’s appointment I think I was too weary and run down to have spent any emotional energy on worrying about the results for a second time. Good thing too, because the doc says everything seems perfect. I just love it when he tells me that! Of course visual inspection and poking and prodding doesn’t tell the whole picture, so I’ll have to wait for another few days for all the lab work to come back, but I’m not too worried.
And for those of you who aren’t really keeping track here’s the schedule: I finished radiation in October and had a baseline CAT scan in November 2010. I'm supposed to go back every 3 months for 2 years, and then every 6 months for an additional 3 years. So that equates to 14 visits ending November 2015! A minimum of 14 exciting nail-biting blog posts will be fast-approaching to coincide with those visit ~ and then I’ll hopefully have to retire this blog for something more… uhm… creative?
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I'm claiming the victory from that visual inspection. "Everything seems perfect." Whoot. Onward and forward we march into our mystery known as life and our futures.
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Michelle, your blog does three things for me:
ReplyDelete1) It teaches me to read faster -- because every post I ingest as quickly as possible to make sure everything is okay
2) makes me appreciate that what everyone else around me is complaining about is BS in comparison to the stuff that matters.
3) makes me miss you and Todd
Hope you stay well and know that you are loved and missed.
Shawn