Did You Ever Think Life Was Gonna Be This Way?

So, after I shared with you my scans post, I went to bed...and waited. The anxiety over my scans and what they would reveal meant I couldn't fall asleep, and my ongoing cough kept me from drifting off anyway - but I was also so tired that I wasn't really awake, either, so I just sort of dog-paddled through the night, treading proverbial water by listening to audiobooks, eating Bit O' Honeys, and playing Yahtzee on my phone. Sleep finally overtook me around 2:30 or 3. But Thursday was another busy day at our house - it was the Thanksgiving lunch celebration at the kids' school at noon, bloodwork and my follow-up scan appointment started at 1:30 all the way across town (of course), kids had to be ferried about to and from wildly different locations at the same exact time (4:30), and then I was scheduled to give a lecture (with my voice only at about 50% capacity) at the local library about the Supreme Court at 6:45. Oh, and it snowed. After being 80 yesterday. The news h...

Today was a scan day for me. I get scans  every 10-12 weeks. What are scans and why do I have them? Why are they both bad and good? What's it like to hang out in an MRI tube for an hour and a half? Read on, friends. All will be revealed. So, there are a number of different ways to take pictures of the inside of your body. We all know about x-rays, which use a quick blast of radiation to give a look at whatever it is targeting - a broken bone, pneumonia, and so on. Dense things - bones, tumors and so on - show up white on an X-ray but soft tissues are grey. But x-rays only give a single image at a time, and the result of an x-ray is 2-D. It's flat. You can't peer around inside of an organ or anything like that. It's just surface shots. If you've never had an X-ray, you basically just stand in front of a little white board, or stick your arm of leg or whatever in front of the board, and the technician positions you, runs out of the room, flips a switch and then comes ...

Wow, so - it's been a while. Here's the thing: I got tired of thinking about cancer all the time, and writing about cancer, and living with cancer, and advocating for people with cancer (that sounds horrible, I know, but it's true), and worrying about cancer, and telling everyone all about my cancer. So, I took a break from all that, and when I wasn't in the hospital getting spartial splenic embolizations (OW OW OW) or trying to get rid of the Pain Syndrome (don't even ask) that the first emobolization gave me or visiting new and exciting specialists, like the hepatologist (that's the liver guy, right? Not the lizard one?), I did some other things. Like read awesome books, and got a new (very part-time but totally fun) job, and revised my career goals, and spent time with my beautiful family. And did I mention that I read a lot of books? I've been feeling pretty good for the last month or two - the medical stars (and my mom's generosity) even aligned f...