Tag: CT scan

This evening, I got my first haircut since February. My hair is fine and grows slowly, so I don’t get it cut that often. The last time I went to the same salon, I took off several inches in preparation for my surgery. My doctor told me that I wouldn’t be able to shower or get my incision wet for a few weeks afterwards, so I wanted something simple and low-maintenance. Tonight, I stared at the person looking back at me in the large mirror, strangely skeptical that it was the same one who sat in the same chair seven months ago. It’s funny how we can meet ourselves again and again in life. After certain things, in anticipation of others… The face in the mirror looked a little different, but what I felt was uncannily the same: fear.

It rises in me at regular intervals now, then recedes, like a tide. My first CT scan last Friday went surprisingly well until it didn’t. The nurse who stuck me for the contrast dye IV was incredibly kind and reassuring. She found my vein on the first try and, because it was only a scan of my head and neck, I didn’t have to drink that awful barium sulfate solution. My time in the machine only lasted about seven minutes, and my mantra had been well-rehearsed. Two hours later, my husband and I were back in the surgical oncologist’s office to go over the results. The nurse practitioner who met with us said that she’d looked over the images and didn’t see anything concerning. “We’re still waiting for the radiologist’s final report,” she explained, “but I think you should be good to come back in six months for your next scan.”

I felt profoundly relieved and dove into the pleasures of a three day weekend headfirst. Then, on Tuesday afternoon, I received the official report from the radiologist via my patient portal. Apparently, there was something concerning. An irregular lymph node in my neck that will need to be more closely monitored. I have to go back for yet another CT scan in three months instead of six.

This news settled hard, to the extent that it settled at all. I asked my doctor for more information; she responded that it is possible I just have an oddly shaped lymph node and, if there are no changes to it in three months, we can assume things are fine. But I’m still reeling from the last time I thought things were fine, and then they weren’t. I suppose this is the new normal, but damn, do I miss the old one.

As I’ve tried to wrap my head around this latest uncertainty–as I’ve moved through a range of emotions from shock to fear to rage to even, at times, forgetting–the consolation that has come to me is an odd one (unless, that is, you have cancer, or something like it). When I began worrying how I would get through the next three months of life and work without letting my pending scan–much less, what might be happening inside my body–weigh so heavily upon me that I might not be able to function, or when I felt sheer anger that I couldn’t have a measly six months out from under cancer’s shadow, I suddenly wondered why I was assuming I had those three months until my next scan at all. To most, this would seem an incredibly morbid thought, but, to me, it was a comfort. I don’t really know how to explain it, but when I first received my diagnosis (and little other information), and feared I might be dying as I drove home from having my blood drawn that day, it occurred to me that I could also die in a car accident at any time. And this offered the strangest sense of relief. I guess simply realizing that I still didn’t know, that all was as uncertain as it had ever been, created some space for hope. Which, though small, is where I’m trying to live for the better part of each day.