The wait

I had the PET/CT scan today.  As before, I got all of the raw data on a CD.  And I'm even sitting here right now looking at in this cool viewer (OsiriX).  But that doesn't mean that I can adequately interpret the data.

It's a pretty complicated program, and I only understand a tiny bit of it.  I can geometrically correlate at least the default view with what is being scanned, as it displays slices moving from head to toe.  And I think I can actually see the difference between my initial scan and the cycle 4 scan.  Lighter colors are higher density, and in general white means bone.  And on the initial scan, there's this big white lump in the middle of my chest.  And that whiteness isn't there on the cycle 4 scan.  So I think I can actually see the improvement from the first half of chemo.  But presumably the differences are expected to be more subtle between the cycle 4 scan and the current scan, since the tumor already was much smaller and less active.  And nothing obvious jumps out at me.

So all I can do is wait.  It's even a little worse than I would like -- my weekly Wednesday appointments are usually early in the afternoon, but for various reasons this week is an exception and it's not until late in the afternoon.  I wish they would at least directly send me a copy of the report, rather than only sending it to my oncologist.  Oh well, it's not that long of wait, and ultimately nothing is any different now than it was before the scan (unless perhaps I have Schrödinger's tumor), but somehow having had the scan but not knowing the results makes me far more anxious than before I had the scan.