So after having three (yes 3) of my doctoral students defend their dissertations Monday and Tuesday, my reward was to spend yesterday and today getting tests and doctoring. The good news is that they have decided to go back to watchful waiting for now. I will have another full body scan in three months (this time including brain) and after that, they will probably break it up into various different kinds of scans for different body parts. But I have to say meetings with a medical oncologist are nothing if not sobering. Right now the disease isn’t doing much of anything. It might continue to not do much of anything, but once it starts “trying to grow” it can move very fast and go from a slow-growing don’t worry about it cancer, to the standard aggressive, take over your body, lights out kind of cancer. And I’m now fully in their system, which is quite functional and efficient, but I’d definitely not be at the place I’m obviously at in triage. It means they think it’s serious.
Now more of the good news. The oncologist said “I’m not impressed by your tumour.” Music to my ears. The CT scan report shows my lung nodules are more or less unchanged since July. The big one was measured a little smaller, but within the realm of human error, so I don’t think the radioactive iodine had any effect. My thyroglobulin is down (that’s the tumour marker in my blood), which is very good.
They also assigned me a primary care doctor (oh the irony, I now have two and many people in Quebec have none), who specializes in young adult cancer patients. Because that’s my category.