Wednesday, May 16, 2012

PET scan tomorrow

I'll try to keep this somewhat brief because it's getting late, I have to get up early tomorrow morning, and I still want to make some chocolate sauce to go with our latest round of ice cream for a late night snack before bed.

The early rise is for a PET scan.  I had one of these before starting chemo, as part of the initial diagnosis.  This is evaluating things at the sort of halfway point.  Sort of for a few reasons -- first because it's after 4 of 8 planned rounds of chemo, but the plan could change (more or less rounds); second because chemo might not be all there is, there might be radiation following.

At first I was kind of excited and looking forward to this.  Then I was a bit scared about what the results might be.  But now I'm kind of thinking that it probably won't be a big deal either way.  There are two extreme results -- that either I have made no progress, or the tumor is completely gone -- but I am extremely doubtful that either of those will be the case.  Almost certainly not the first, given how much better I feel.  So likely the tumor will be smaller, although the expected reduction is probably in some range, and maybe the reduction is as expected, or maybe less so, or maybe more.  But I bet even if it's less or more that at this point it probably won't change the plan that drastically, and that I'll be told not to read too much into things either good or bad.  So we'll just have to see.  Regardless, it is kind of nice to be reaching this milestone, and I am curious to see how it goes.

Overall things continue to go very well, about as good as can be expected.  The side effects from this round of chemo have been very minimal, even during week 2.  And today I felt strong enough to go to a real yoga class.  My workplace has free yoga once a week at a studio across the street.  I had been getting a few personal lessons at my house with the same instructor that were fairly on the mellow side.  Today I just went to the normal class.  It was a little intense at times, but nothing that I couldn't handle, and I felt great afterwards.  Having cleared this milestone, I think I'd like to start doing it a bit more regularly.  And maybe start going to classes at the yoga center that I had been going to pretty regularly for quite some time a few years back.  I initially stopped a bit before Dylan was born -- first because I felt too busy for it, and then I didn't return to it because I was sick.

Ok, time for some dessert.  I can't eat for 8 hours before the scan, so I want to load up a bit on calories in advance.

1 comment:

Dorothy Fromm said...

So glad to hear the good news!