A whole week between CT scans

   My damn left shin is a pain. Specifically it's a pain if I walk, or sit, or sleep.  It seems I can't get any long-term relief.  It's not an agonizing pain but it's annoying and for a while I thought it might be getting better.  Wishful thinking perhaps,  but I found I simply wasn't comfortable, unable to sleep soundly, or walk, or worst of all, just not knowing what it was.

  Over a month ago I had a Bone Scan, which showed suspicious activity and signaled alarms that Paget's Disease or Metastasis was the cause.  I was scared, and made an immediate follow-up appointment with the family doctor who had ordered the tests.  While the Bone Scan screamed cancer, the X-ray said no evidence.  I felt relieved and even happy for a while.   Perhaps I had  damaged my bone with some sort of physical trauma.  But the pain wouldn't subside for any period of time.  It wasn't horribly bad, it was just there.  Annoying and unpredictable.  However my work and life quality were suffering.  I couldn't think or concentrate for prolonged periods.  I brought this up with my Oncologist, who upon examining my shin said it was probably a metastasis, eating away at the bone.  Great, now I'm a cancer chew-toy.

  To confirm this I would have another CT scan.   Within two days of my visit to the Oncologist, I was scheduled for a late-evening CT of my left leg.   No preparation needed to be imbibed, no IV for contrast injections, just slide me into the CT and dose me with a whack of radiation.  While my oncologist indicated that colon cancer patients presenting with bone metastasis were rare, it was not unheard of.  Even so, as a precaution  I would have a consult with a Radiation Oncologist.  The consult would take place exactly one week after my recent CT of my left leg.

 Thursday morning, June 11th and I'm at the Windsor Regional Cancer Centre.   However since this is to visit a Radiation Oncologist, I'm meeting in a different venue than where I've gone for the past five years.  While it's a new office with new people, some things don't change:  like the boring, repetitious  recitation of my medical history, my list of prescription meds and other minor trivia (like, what's bothering me now...)  (Remind me to invent the app that lets patients and physicians update their medical databases per every visit. )  Administrative work completed, now I would meet the Doctor, and finally have the shin pain mystery solved.

 I knew it was cancer.  I've known since before the Bone Scan.  Call it denial, but I like to think that I was now ready to hear the news.  I didn't get upset, or insist on bone biopsies (ugh) or any further tests.  I wanted to move forward to the next phase:  Radiation Therapy.   It was again stressed that  this is strictly  palliative.   Some folks equate 'palliative' with 'imminent death'.  I believe that it's going to help me feel better, and frankly that's all I want.  My outlook on life is now looking towards the immediate future:  This week. Tomorrow.  Today.  While the treatment itself is quite easy and quick, there were some preliminaries, and it would begin the very next day, with another CT scan.

  This CT scan is a simulation, designed to set up the guide posts for the real treatment process.  The way they do this is with precision scanning of the affected area and using alignment dots tattooed on your skin.   In other words, I just got some rad, wicked, ink. Dude.

  My treatments are expected to start within two weeks, so hopefully by the end of June.  The treatment itself apparently takes only ten minutes, and is repeated for five days.  So they'll start on a Monday and by Friday I'll be done.  I'm told there  will be some initial discomfort -basically I'm getting a daily dose of sunburn.  For relief, apparently Hydrocortisone cream will be prescribed..  It can't be any worse than  what I'm going through now. (Actually there's a suspicious spot on my right knee that will need further investigation.)

  So I've had a seven-day stretch between CT scans and now all I can do is wait for my treatment.  I'm sure it'll be a blast!

Hard Questions, Tougher Answers

   April is the month of Daffodils, the yellow flower that symbolizes the fight against cancer.  For me however, April is forever linked with either being informed I have cancer, or receiving treatment for it.  April is not my favourite month.  My latest news that I had cancer in my lung was, to put it mildly, a complete shock.   No matter how often I'd consider the possibility of recurrence, I never imagined I wouldn't be able to escape one more time.  For a time I would dwell in sorrow and despair, and that, for me, is the worst aspect of enduring this disease.

  I made another appointment with my Oncologist, I had to ask the tough questions and fully comprehend the answers.   The first question:  How long do I have?  The question everyone wants to know but dreads the answer.   "A couple of years" is what I might have.  There is no absolute measure.  I take that as a guide, knowing that the time is dependent on how well chemo holds the cancer at bay, and hope that there will be no further metastasis.   It is a grim number,  but one I'll work with.

  There is one other question I ask because it is asked of me:  Why don't I start chemo now?  A good question, because it seems logical you would want treatment before the cancer grows further.  As it was explained to me, and I accept it as such:  chemo won't make me feel any better right now.   Right now I'm breathing fine, I'm active, I'm capable doing normal everyday activities.  I can ride my bike just fine.   I have energy.  Whacking me with chemo will reduce my vitality without any apparent gain - no symptoms presenting, so no way to see if I'm getting better.  Plus there's  a catch:  what kind of cancer do I have anyways?

  My original diagnosis years ago was Colon cancer.   The progress of Colon cancer is through the liver and lungs.  Chemo treatments are targeted to specific cancers:  if it's a metastasis of the colon but presenting in the lungs, you use a chemo for colon cancer.  If it's a new primary,  I'll need a different chemo.  To determine what kind I have however, I'll need a lung biopsy.

  For the lung biopsy I would meet another new doctor.  My lung specialist had me do a breathing test first, I suppose to establish a baseline.   This test consists of being put inside a small plexiglass box and breathing though a tube  approximately the size of a car tailpipe.   A clip is placed on your nose so you don't accidentally inhale through that orifice as well.  The test doesn't take long, but it is repetitive.  I huffed and I puffed, doing my best Big Bad Wolf impression, and within twenty minutes or so I was done.  My next appointment would be with the lung doctor himself, to review my test results.

  Fortunately I didn't have long to wait -the very next day in fact.  I met with my doctor and he seemed to think I was breathing satisfactorily, no wheezing, coughing up blood or other issues of respiratory distress.   Then he showed my my CT scan.  Despite having had numerous scans myself, I've never actually seen the resultant images.  Today I would see the 3D tour of my lungs.   My right lung looked, well, lung-like.  My Left sort of seemed to be two smaller lungs jammed together, a narrowing that looked like someone was trying to make a balloon animal.  That's where the cancer lived:  in the upper quadrant of my left lung.  Apparently there were various lymph nodes, around my chest that might be suspect too.  But the one item that was terrorizing my life was apparently encroaching one of the airways to my lung.  That was discouraging.  Now we needed to find out what kind of cancer I have.  For that a Bronchoscopy and a biopsy will be needed.

  So Thursday June 18th, I'll be at the local hospital for another day procedure, with another tube being pushed into another orifice.   Who wouldn't want to look forward to that?!