I Am Cancer Free!

Seriously.

No residual cancer in my chest, abdomen or pelvis. Also, no new cancer in my chest, abdomen or pelvis.

It's all good, kids.

To paraphrase Dr. Academic, I'm as close to cured as I'm going to get.

Thanks for all of your support, my devoted Cake Eater readers. You're a bunch of rock stars.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to go and get stinkin' drunk.

Posted by: Kathy at 05:49 PM | Comments (19) | Add Comment
Post contains 76 words, total size 1 kb.

Later on today, I will travel to Dr. Academic's office and find out the results of my Pet Scan.

Holy crap, am I ever tweaked about this.

Gah. I know I'm flipping out over nothing. I know I am, but, God help me, I can't quite keep myself from doing so. This is such a bad move. I know it, but, again, I can't help myself.

I woke up at five this morning, which I think we all know, my devoted Cake Eater readers, doesn't happen even when I want to wake up at five. I'm not a morning person. At all. Yet, this morning, I woke up while it was still dark and, better yet, was completely awake, instead of being groggy and crabby at being disturbed. This never happens. Just ask the husband. I got up, went to the little girls' room, had a drink of water, and then went back to bed. It was only through repeated rubbing of my back that the husband was able to lull me back to sleep. Sigh. He's such a good egg. I honestly don't know what I'd do without him.

Sigh.

I know this appointment is probably going to take less than fifteen minutes.

I know that this appointment won't start any where near the scheduled time. Dr. Academic will be running late, as always. And he will be in a hurry to give me the results, and when that's done, will do his absolute best to whoosh out of the exam room, because he's got his reputation as the human tornado to uphold.

I know it will probably be all good and that everything is fine, but...

...what if it isn't?

That's all I can think about. I can think positively as much as I'd like to, but thinking positively about this stuff has not gotten me very far in this whole fiasco. I've learned the hard way that thinking positively, and hoping for the best, will only lead me to rack and ruin. But keeping the negative stuff from being too negative, if you get what I'm saying, my devoted Cake Eater readers, is even harder, it seems. I'm having all sorts of visions of more cancer, more surgery, and more chemo. And it's all scaring the shit out of me, because I don't want ANY of those things to happen. Even though it's highly unlikely that they will, in the first place.

Sigh.

Like a drunk driver completing a sobriety test, I'm searching for the fine line in the middle, kids, and I'm having a hard time slapping my big fat feet down on it.

Keep your fingers crossed, my devoted Cake Eater readers, eh? Not just for everything to be fine, but so that I don't lose what's left of my already-addled mind between now and two.

Posted by: Kathy at 10:13 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 475 words, total size 3 kb.

Well, after two months of insurance related hell (Fight the power that be! WOOT! Idiots. Every single last one of them.), I have finally been approved and scheduled to have the Pet/CT Scan which should prove, once and for all, that I'm cancer-free.

Dr. Academic wanted me to have this done in the middle of September, a month after finishing chemo. Because of the aforementioned insurance related hell, I'm just getting around to having it now, almost three months after finishing chemo.

And I'm suddenly nervous as all get out.

I know why this is. I think most rational people could figure it out and it's, obviously, that I'm afraid the cancer is still there, despite the results of somewhere around ten different CA-125 tests that show precisely the opposite. I'm lucky. CA-125 works for me. It doesn't work for 20% of women, who could, quite literally, have a cancerous cyst on their ovary that's roughly the size of a football and the test would still show a number in the normal range. God only knows what size of a hissy fit I would have worked myself up to by now if I couldn't rely on the CA-125 results. But, since my appointment is in a couple of hours, well, I'm just starting to work myself up now.

I don't know what to think about this. It should confirm what Dr. Academic has been telling me all along: That they got all of the cancer in the surgery and that I'm cancer-free. We may not know the how or why I came to be an ovarian cancer patient in the first place, but that, I've found doesn't really matter. Particularly when there's the now to be dealt with. Where am I now? Is the cancer gone? Like I've been told repeatedly. Or is it back? Has it been there all along? Did the chemo work as promised? Or has it, perhaps, gone someplace else? What, precisely, will this scan show? Will it pick it up at all if it's back? It's scary shit, my devoted Cake Eater readers. And I won't know the results for another week and a half, because that's the earliest I could get an appointment to see Dr. Academic.

There are all these variables running around in my head. Telling me not to think about it is about as futile as telling a hamster to get off the wheel. It's just not going to happen. I know I shouldn't be worrying about it. That everything is as Dr. Academic has told me repeatedly. That I'm just, per usual, making a mountain out of a molehill. Sigh. It's just that they said it wasn't anything the first time around. And it was something. A very serious something. It's a fine line to walk. I want to believe them, but a part of me is sounding the alarm bells, telling me not to until all the evidence is in. That I'll just be setting myself up for further heartbreak if I do believe their positive prognosis, and the results come in stating the opposite.

There is one thing I shall be paying a great deal of attention to today, however, is the reaction of the people working there. You see, when I was in the ER, and they gave me a CAT scan and an ultrasound, well, the behavior of the people running the scans changed dramatically over the course of the scans. They'd be friendly one minute, then the next, when the size of the problem was apparent, they'd clam up. The CAT scan people weren't too bad, but you could definitely sense an attitude adjustment in the air. The lady who did the ultrasound, however, was as chatty as could be and then she completely shut up. Not a peep left her mouth. She didn't even want to tell me I was done. She simply covered me up and arranged for transport. The ER nurse, too, kept shooting me meaningful glances, like she was trying to tip me off to just how serious this was, despite what the doctors had told me. I, of course, noted all of this at the time, but refused to pay any attention to it because it went against my general world view that everything was going to be just fine. I'm determined not to make the same mistake again. I will be watching them like a hawk. And if, for instance, they're having a bad day and just aren't feeling particularly chatty in the first place, well, I'll undoubtedly make a lot of it.

Sigh.

But, right now, all I want to do is eat lunch. You can't have food four hours before the scan, so despite having a large bowl of oatmeal (with raisins!) for breakfast, I'm now very, very hungry. It's time to get this crap over with.

Mainly because I want to eat something.

The Post-Scan Update

Well, all things considered, there are worse ways to spend an afternoon. Like sitting in a recliner, hooked up to an IV at the oncologist's office.

Here's where the scan was done. If you've got some time to blow take a virtual tour of the office. This was, by leaps and bounds and the occasional skip-to-my-lou, the swankiest office I've been in since this whole thing started. The oncologist's office is, well, serviceable. That's the nicest way to decribe it. My OB-GYN is in the same building as the Pet Scan place and I thought their office was nice. It's nothing compared to the Pet Scan place. It's like the difference between the furniture outlet and the Henredon showroom. Suddenly, it makes an awful lot of sense why these things are $1700 a pop.

The process was fairly routine. I was quickly ushered into a plush waiting room, with a leather recliner (take that, you cheap oncologists! Vinyl. PAH!) where the nurse quizzed me about all the drugs I was on, had taken in the past couple of months, and about the chemo, etc. She then started an IV, but there wasn't a drip involved, thankfully; she simply brought out this two-inch-wide, five-inch-long, steel encased syringe and shot the radioactive sugar solution (FDG) into it. After that, she handed me a glass of what looked like Milk of Magnesia (berry flavored!) and a small bottle of water for a chaser and told me to drink up. This was the contrast. Between the two of them, they would light my innards up like a pinball machine visible from space.

I had to sit around for forty-five minutes, to allow these two things to start flowing through my body, and then it was time for the scan. The PET scan machine looked exactly like House's MRI of Doom, only bigger and with a longer table. I laid down, put my arms up around my ears and they ran me in and out of the donut portion for the better part of a half-hour. I almost fell asleep. It was so very quiet. No thunking. No bells. No whistles. Nothing. Just a light mechanical purr. With this they can see if there's any cancer left, because the cancer cells will feast on the FDG, which is partially a simple sugar solution, and it'll show. They apparently can stage cancer with this puppy by watching just how fast the sugar is metabolized by the cancer cells. Which, is pretty cool, particularly when they usually have to figure that out via surgery. It can even differentiate between malignant and benign tumors, and it'll pick up any cancer recurrence more quickly than a blood test.

When it was over with, I, of course, paid particular attention to how the nurse was acting. She was the same after as she'd been before. I said, "I almost hate to ask, but how did it look?" She replied, "I have no idea. The computer is still processing the images. "

Duh.

Posted by: Kathy at 11:47 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 1328 words, total size 8 kb.

Hey, Fattie McFatFat, put down the Pringles, the steak and that third beer or you'll get cancer.

Scientists with the American Institute for Cancer Research and the World Cancer Research Fund in Britain have analyzed thousands of recent studies and produced 10 recommendations to help people lower their risk.

Men should consume no more than two alcoholic beverages daily, and women, only one, the report says. Several studies have associated alcohol consumption with elevated breast cancer risk.

Other recommendations include avoiding cigarettes, red and processed meats, consuming a diet rich in vegetables, and exercising 30 minutes a day.

“There is a major and very important conclusion,” said Walter Willet, one of the report’s authors, “and that is: Overweight and obesity can contribute to an individual’s cancer risk — abdominal circumference, especially.”

We think people should be as lean as possible without being underweight,” said Willet, an epidemiologist and physician at Harvard University’s School of Public Health.

Fat, especially in the midsection, can increase the production of hormones that drive development and growth of cancer cells, he said.

{...}Experts evaluated more than 7,000 studies over five years to compile the report. Panelists found “convincing evidence” that carrying extra weight, particularly around the waist, may lead to cancer of the esophagus, pancreas, colon, kidney and uterus, as well as post-menopausal breast cancer.{...}

If you have massive amounts of time to blow, you can read the entire report here. All five hundred and thirty seven pages of it.

See, this is not how research dollars should be spent, in my humble opinion. Trolling through old studies, looking for evidence to back up pre-determined conclusions that just happen to coincide with major public health initiatives is not great in the overall scheme of things.

Color me skeptical about this report. Deep purply shades of skeptical, bordering on black.

I don't particularly like studies like this, where researchers compile data from numerous and varying studies and purport to draw previously unseen conclusions from said data. Correlation does not equal causation. It does not appear to me, not having read the study, that they actually did anything to prove that having some extra weight around the midsection actually increases your risk of cancer; it's that they looked over old studies and drew that conclusion. It may be true, but damnit, I want proof. Particularly when it appears that they're trying to link this finding to the overarching push against obesity. Again, correlation does not equal causation. It's just that simple. Never mind that it appears they looked very little at other factors, like genetics, that are equally if not more important in preventing cancer.

I'm tired of this shit.

Look, I can't tell you how many freakin' statistics I've had thrown at me since I was diagnosed. They're everywhere you look. The doctors and nurses shoot them at you, with increasing regularity and without a second thought, because these statistics are the only proof they can give you regarding your treatment, and, ultimately, your outcome. These statistics come from research done in the field, obviously, and health care providers would be lax in their duties if they didn't keep up with them. As such, they will tell you that you have a 25% increased chance of this, or a 25% decreased chance of that, and a 90% chance of the other. You, as a cancer patient, quite literally, have to make life or death choices based on statistics. You need those statistics to be good. You need good math to plan out how you're going to fight this disease. So, when someone trolls through a bunch of studies and tells me that, in their humble opinion, I'd better keep the fat off because there's an increased chance of my cancer returning if I have one extra hamburger per week, they'd better have good math, and ultimately a good study, to back up their conclusions. My life has been altered enough, thank you ever so bloody much. I'm not going to alter it more based on what I consider to be shoddy work.

It's one thing to educate yourself when you're looking at cancer. That's important and I'm not going to knock anyone who wants to do the research. What I will say, however, is that if you don't have an understanding into how a simple statistical poll is conducted, you'd better learn, and you'd better learn fast. If you don't understand how the study was conducted and what kind of math they used, you can't judge the veracity of it, let alone the efficacy. How many people will take the highlights of this study as the God's honest truth and will alter their lives because of it? Even though it's highly specious? Well meaning doctors will throw this one at overweight patients as added incentive, even if the link hasn't been conclusively proven, because fighting obesity is seen to be fighting for the greater good. Legislators will then get involved because there's a risk of cancer from being obese, they will predict health care costs will go up and all sorts of shit will start being banned for our own good. You can see it, can't you? It has the potential to spiral out of control. Individual choice will be then limited because of a specious study that doesn't actually prove anything.

Never mind that this is not how I want research dollars spent, thank you ever so bloody much. That's apparently not all that important in the scheme of things. But if you can link cancer to being overweight, because it so nicely dovetails with other public health goals, it's apparently all right to go for it. Because an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Which ultimately means that you're screwing over the people who actually do have cancer, and would like a cure or an effective treatment, thanks ever so bloody much, because it's deemed more important to spend money researching how to prevent it in the first place. Just speaking as an ovarian cancer survivor, this pisses me off. We don't have an early screening test for ovarian cancer, along the lines of a Pap Smear for cervical cancer. You, generally, find out when you're on the table, if you're lucky enough to get to the table at all because the symptoms are so freakin' vague to begin with. For most women diagnosed with ovarian cancer, this means that they catch it late, when the chances of survival are low. I'm lucky they caught it when they did, but Dr. Academic admitted flat out that they don't know much about my stage of ovarian cancer; they know a hell of a lot more about the later stages simply because that's when more women are diagnosed. Currently, in the United States, we spend $600 per death on ovarian cancer research. With breast and prostate cancer it's $3000 per death. Yet, ovarian cancer is the fifth leading cause of death in women. Around 22,000 women this year alone will be diagnosed; of that number, roughly 15,000 will die because of the disease. That's almost two-thirds, which is just an unacceptable statistic, if you ask me, but they're not asking me where I'd like research dollars spent to lower that number. Nooo. They're more interested in spending research dollars on specious studies that don't prove anything when it comes to preventing cancer, but that do dovetail nicely with what they consider to be the greater good.

Just never mind all those dead cancer patients along the way.

Posted by: Kathy at 12:22 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 1268 words, total size 8 kb.