Scans are Clean, No Bone Mestastis
This entry was posted on 2/25/2007 4:08 PM and is filed under Facing the C Word.
Nov. 21, 2006
In two days we will be with m family in Columbia for Thanksgiving. This is a Thanksgiving for which I can be really thankful. Despite my fears, my pelvic scan and bone scans came back clean.
The week has been difficult.
Monday night, the night before going to the doctor for the results, fear began to overtake me. I hardly slept. When I wrote in this journal, it was as a man who had decided that his days were numbered. I wondered how much longer I had and would those days be painful. I wondered how I would tell people. I wondered how those who closest to me would handle it.
In the doctors office I told Mary Anne that she needed to prepare for the worst. I was sure. I thought the symptoms were pretty clear. Starting a year ago, a deep pain in my hip that extended into my leg whenever I sat in one place too long. The pain now goes on down to the heal and I feel it when I step out of bed in the morning.
I was sure that the bone scan would be my death sentence.
It wasn’t.
But once I got the good news, why didn’t that deep fear translate into ecstasy? Why was the negative emotion so strong and the positive one so weak? Why do I so rarely feel strong joy? Why do I so rarely laugh?
I am not living life as fully as I could. This has forced me to think about that. No matter how this comes out, I am much more aware of my mortality. I may very well not have a lot of years ahead of me. The risk factors are starting to mount up with sleep apnea, heart disease, HLA-B27, and now cancer. No insurance company would want to bet on me.
What do I want to do to make the most of the time I have left? If I can find an answer to that question it could be the silver lining that comes out of all of this.
