August 30, 2004
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I’m going to have to cancel my charter membership to CLSIFC (the Chicken Little, Sky Is Falling Club). I have found that this organization promotes a very irrational and, come to find, inaccurate approach to assimilating and responding to insufficient data.
I have what could be called a chronic form of cancer, Indolent Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. It is treatable, but not curable so, one enters states of remission during which time you get periodic tests, usually CT scans to look for renewed activity. Like Pooh, I was all in a bother last week because the CT technician asked a benign question, “have you had a chest Xray recently?”. According to CLSIFC guidelines this could mean nothing other than, he saw a huge tumor in my chest during the CT scan. Welllll….
I got the Xray and CT report today which showed that there has been no change in tumor count, location, or size since the last scan in May. Hooooraaayyy. My onc is interpreting this as a good thing (according to the nurse that I talked to). I will actually see the onc on 9/14. She probably won’t want to do anything until I’m symptomatic again.
So, I’ve learned a little lesson…which will probably last just about until my next scan time.
(LMF – tag, you’re it)
Bob
Comments (6)
That is good news… congratulations! Keep up the tumor non-growth!
WONDERFUL news!!
I can’t begin to imagine how your life-cycle must change, once cancer enters into the equation. My only very distant-cousin sort of experience was my several-years’ bout with infertility, where every month was a cycle of hope and despair. But of course that was a very different treadmill, where the only place “hope” could go was up, and “despair” was the status-quo. Cancer, it would seem, has it from the other end, with “hope” being the status quo. But it’s not so simple as that, is it? I would think that a nearer sense of one’s own mortality would bring a heightened sense of the wonder of life – on the good days. And on different days, perhaps a heightened sense of the general idiocy of the complacent masses, who so blindly ignore the equally near-term of their own mortality, less defined but just as certain.
I always smile at your use of hard scientific terminology (“….approach to assimilating and responding to insufficient data”) in the course of what to me is a situation based entirely upon immeasurable things such as intellect and emotion.
This is why I would never do as an ME, of course…….
P.S. does blogging on your blog count? No? Well grumpity-grump, off to write ………
Deep, deep breaths of life, my friend.
Mazel Tov! I’m glad the sky stays in place! Blessings abound
Hey, I guess we’re BOTH doing pretty damned good. Your demons and mine are different, but we’re winning, and that’s what’s important. I really want us to both be around for a long enough time to get to know each other better. Deal?
Wow, I throroughly appreciate your perspective here. It’s difficult to not be a charter member of that club when this is your day to day circumstance.
I like what LMF said about the masses. Complacency, to my eyes, has become a ‘cancer’ of sorts, plaguing most of our culture.
Here’s to your good days! May they be many and full of memory making and sharing and all the good things with which you decide to fill them. After all, none of us are promised tomorrow.
Deb