Cycle four and the results

It's fair to say I've been a bit slack on the upkeep of this blog lately.
But I've decided it's time to finish this thing, tie up all the loose ends and extricate myself from the tangled web that is cyberspace.

I finished my fourth and final cycle of chemotherapy at the start of August, the last lot really knocked me around and I'm not sure I'll ever be able to watch an Olympic event again without a faint urge to purge. Probably no great loss.

That last cycle and the subsequent recovery are a bit of a blur, I ate boxes of icy poles, watched a shitload of obscure Olympic sports contested by little known Eastern European nations on SBS and lay around with a cold facewasher on my forehead wondering if I looked as much like Alexander Litvinenko as I imagined.

I had my first post chemo CT scan a few weeks later, by this time I was feeling better. So much so that the day before the scan I had a couple of friends round for some beers in the sun. The sun went down, the beers continued and we had a damn good time until the next morning when I woke up with a raging thirst and a bit of a headache only to realise I was already within 6 hour no food or drink pre scan window. I doubt the nurse would have given me so much sympathy after I threw up the contrast solution if she'd known I'd been quaffing stubbies the night before.

After the big reduction in the previous scan I was pretty optimistic about these results expecting to hear that not only had the tumour vanished but I'd also won the oncology department meat raffle or something so I was a bit put out to find out the tumour hadn't really shrunk at all since the last scan and that because they couldn't give me anymore of that type of chemo I'd probably need a fair bit of radiotherapy.

I doubt my friends know how much of what they've done for me in the last few months has made this whole experience bearable (and in some instances pretty entertaining) but that evening a friend cooked burrittos and we spent the night musing about travelling, the odds of one of us ever getting to shout "follow that car" and other non-cancer banter.

The next step is another PET scan which differs from a CT scan in that it can see inside the tumour and determine how much is still living tissue.

An old friend (to protect the identities of the innocent and given that she chucked a sickie from work to take me to the Austin hospital for the scan we'll refer to her only as Bree) picks me up from the train station and we head back to her place for a bit of pre scan Mario Kart. After the last PET scan experience which involved a lot of Enya I've taken my own CD down, I'm a little miffed to open the case and discover not "The outernational sound" by Thievery corporation but "The sinister urge" by Rob Zombie, a good album but not necessarily the sort of thing you want to listen to in a tube.

After being shot up with the radioactive sugar and given a bit of a lie down to allow it to disseminate they position me in the machine. "Oh, what sort of music do you like?" asks the radiologist "Moby right?", I know she's made the assumption because I'm a bald man with glasses and as much as I'd like to correct the stereotype I do actually like Moby, it seems like the right kind of tube atmosphere.

The results for the PET scan came back yesterday and I headed in bracing myself to hear I was going to spend the summer radioactive.

The Oncologist is quite animated, there's definitely a vibe here, either I've got some new type of cancer that's of particular interest to him or something's in the air.
"Has anyone spoken to you about these results?" he asks, I shake my head
"well it's really good news!" he says "based on these results you don't need any further treatment, what's left of the tumour is dead"

In my experience with cancer there's not many of these moments, not "you're cured" moments but something for nothing moments. Every gain usually has it's price.

We spend the rest of the consultation discussing the good news, follow up observation and a strange brown pigmentation that appeared on one of my legs during the chemo. Then I leave the hospital not sure whether I'm going to laugh or to cry and wondering how one celebrates in Ballarat on a weekday lunchtime.

That was yesterday.

It's a strange thing but now to look back I wouldn't change the way things happened, if I was given the option for the Ecuadorian doctor's diagnosis to have been correct I wouldn't take it. Physically the chemo has taken it's toll on my body and given the scar on my stomach I'll never be a swimsuit model but... well maybe I'll bore you with it some other time.

It's going to be a good Summer.