Oncology Follow-up #1: 3 months out

Actually more like four months, since I didn't do radiation.  As you can imagine, and as I have noted previously, I wasn't really looking forward to today.  On several occasions I had serious thoughts about canceling.  I didn't.


I mentioned earlier that I felt great for months after finishing chemotherapy.  I was bursting with energy and requiring very little sleep.  About a month ago, however, I started having fevers, chills, body aches, some lethargy, and even night sweats.  I was convinced I had relapsed.  Of course it would be really soon (and really bad, from a prognosis standpoint) if that were true, but you simply can't help but think that.  I even had my own little mini-breakdown moment one day before work when I had convinced myself of all this.


On Monday I had my bloodwork done and got my chest x-ray.  The bloodwork is basically done in a few hours as it is just a BMP, LDH, and CBC with differential.  By Wednesday, the results still were not released to me, and I remember confiding in a close friend that it had me in a bit of a panic.  Your mind races.  Is the doctor just busy or does she not want me to see it?  Logic assumes the former, emotion assumes the latter.  Although I try to live my life letting logic rule my mind, cancer really rachets up the emotion.


As it turns out, the labs eventually were released later Wednesday night and were perfectly normal.  Nothing even close to unusual.  I was relieved.  I found out Thursday that my chest x-ray was normal as well.  In other words, I'm still clean.  This didn't explain my symptoms.


When we discussed that, she noted that it is possible that I overdid things early in summer.  Likewise, it was a little unfair to assume I'd feel "normal" immediately and forever, and most folks take at least a year to normalize, physically.  Additionally, most males become frustrated by this.  (Why wouldn't females be frustrated?  I have no idea).


She looked at my nail beds and determined my body was still getting rid of chemo.  From a pharmacokinetic standpoint, this doesn't make sense, but I can assume the point to get at is that my body is still recovering from the effects.  My (possibly incorrect) rationalization is that chemotherapy immediately affects the cells in your body that turn over the fastest:  cancer, of course, but also hair, skin, your GI tract, etc.  Perhaps the effect to the rest of the body is much slower, and therefore much slower to recover.   I'll go with that theory for now, hopefully someone can correct or validate it.


Beyond that we talked a little bit about survivorship issues and life outlook.  She was happy to order a PET scan for me to ease my mind on my subjective symptoms, but I simply refuse to give in to that.  Logically, the objective findings are what they are, and I do not want subjectives to trump that.


In the meantime, I get another four months until I get to do this roller coaster all over again.  If symptoms change, I'm obviously supposed to call.