Sweet Relief

For anyone who doesn't want to read through everything that happened in the last month, let me sum up:  a biopsy of the remainder of my tumor came back clean and I'll be starting radiation soon.


If you're happy with that summary, see you next post.  If you want the details of how we got to this point and why that is incredibly good news, keep reading:

When we last left our heroine, she had just learned from her doctor that more chemo, radiation, or a stem cell transplant were all on the table for treatment options, but that she needed to get a second opinion on how to proceed.

After initially being told that it might take anywhere from 1-4 weeks to get approval for the second opinion consult, it was only a little over a week before I heard from my office that my insurance had approved the request and the appointment was scheduled.  Shortly after that, I got a call from someone at the new office who insisted that they were out of network for my insurance and the appointment wouldn't be covered.  I freaked out slightly, went to my office, and sat down with the scheduler there while she called back to get things straightened out.  I ultimately got a call from the director at the new office apologizing for the confusion, promising that everything was fine, and giving me her contact information in case there were any other issues.

The doctor we were going to see was the director of a bone marrow transplant program, so I went into this assuming that I most likely needed a stem cell transplant but my doctor just wanted to make sure.  So I had read a bunch about SCTs - what the procedure would entail, what the side effects would be ... not pleasant.  But I was pretty sure this was in my future and I would obviously do whatever was necessary.  However, when we saw her the following week, we learned that she could not make any recommendations about treatment course without a biopsy.  Sometimes you can get a false positive on a PET scan from cells that are dying, so she needed to look to make sure she knew what we were dealing with.  This didn't seem that likely, given that my scans after 3 cycles and after 6 cycles looked essentially the same, but we had to make sure.

The biopsy was scheduled for the end of the following week.  Having gone through this once before, I figured this was no big deal, but things didn't go as well this time.  First, the procedure was in the afternoon and the doctor ended up being almost 2 hours late.  Not having been allowed to eat or drink after midnight the night before, I was getting a bit hangry at that point.  Second, after the doctor took the last sample, I started to get a shooting pain in my ribs that ran from the front of my chest around the bottom of my ribs into my back.  It hurt to breathe, it hurt to move, and the pain was intense enough to make me cry.  They sent me for a chest x-ray but everything looked normal - no punctured lung here.  The doctor's thought was that the nerves that run that path were irritated from the biopsy and that it would feel better pretty quickly.  They gave me some pain meds and by the next morning, it was completely fine.  I was still sore and slightly uncomfortable at the site of the biopsy for the next day, but it was a manageable soreness.

A little over a week more of waiting brings us up to yesterday, when my doctor walked into my appointment with a huge grin on his face and said that he had really good news for us.  The biopsy showed no sign of active disease and I just need radiation.  I cried.  There was hugging.  It was a good day.

I have an appointment with the radiation oncologist on Thursday to find out more about the timeline, but even the worst extreme of radiation is better than the best extreme of a stem cell transplant.  I am immensely relieved and am hopeful that I'll get through this next phase without feeling too terrible.  And it's now possible that I might be done treatment before Thanksgiving - what a wonderful holiday gift that would be!