The Penultimate Day Of Waiting

Number of days until I find out whether or not the cancer has come back: 1
Mood: apprehensive to say the least!

Finally the months have ticked down and the mammouth wait is almost at an end. This time tomorrow I will be less than an hour away from finding out whether or not the cancer really has spread to my bowel. To say I am worried and nervous about the appointment would be a vast understatement! Still, it will just be so good to know what’s going on, one way or another.

Last week, in preparation for tomorrow’s appointment with my oncologist, I had a pelvic and abdominal MRI scan. This is so that the doctors can compare it to the one I had 4 months ago and look to see whether or not the spots they saw on my bowel the first time around have grown, multiplied etc. I also had blood tests to check my CA125 levels (the protein in your blood that is sometimes produced by ovarian cancer cells and therefore can be an indicator of ovarian cancer) to see if they have changed. The blood test didn’t go too smoothly however, because they let a trainee loose on me - perhaps not the best idea when my veins are pretty shot from so many blood tests and all the chemo! So the poor woman poked repeatedly at the only vein she could find for ages, but to no avail - not one drop of blood would leak out. So, after apologising profusely, she had to ask one of the other nurses to take over, who on her second attempt finally managed to get a whole tube of blood out. Of course after being poked about so much I developed a rather impressive bruise, the problem being that it’s right on the inside of my elbow so whenever anyone I don’t know sees it I swear they think I’m a drug addict!

Thankfully after all that the MRI scan was a breeze. I forget between each scan just how claustrophobic they are though: you lie down on a bed which slides into a tunnel, the roof of which feels literally inches from your nose, and are injected with a contrast dye so that they can see everything better. Then a prop is placed under your legs to raise them, and you have metal plates placed over your abdomen. Once that is done you are strapped down tightly onto the bed so you can’t move. You are given a bell in the fingertips of one hand in case you start to panic and need to come out, or start feeling ill, but your fingertips are literally the only things you are capable of moving. It’s also incredibly noisy once the machine starts, so much so that even with the industrial headphones you are given to wear you still feel like you’re being deafened. Still, after about 25-30 minutes the claustrophobic noisiness was all over, and I got to go home with the knowledge that in a matter of hours some radiographer somewhere could know my fate.

The wait over the last week for the appointment with my oncologist to come around has in some ways been harder than the whole of the last few months for that very reason: because all I can think about is that the doctors have already seen my scan and so already know what is going on, but I don’t. I still have no idea whether or not everything is going to be ok. For the first couple of months after getting the results from my last MRI scan and finding out the cancer may have spread to my bowel I really swayed between thinking it was going to be ok, and thinking it wasn’t. But for the last couple of weeks I haven’t felt hugely confident about the outcome. They always say to trust your intuition, and so far over the last 3 years since I became ill mine has always been spot on. However now I’m not sure whether it’s intuition that is telling me things aren’t completely right, or whether it’s just nerves and anxiety that are driving me to think it. Plus my track record doesn’t exactly stand me in good stead for positive outcomes, which could be making me wrongly think the worst. So, all in all I guess there is just no telling how things are going to go. But, now I’ve had some time to get over the chemo, I feel strong enough that if there is more treatment up ahead then I know I can get through it and fight it all the way. I just really really hope I’m not going to have to…

Em