Just Another Manic Monday

Hi there,

Today I don’t feel like being tough or being positive. Today I just feel plain lousy. I woke up feeling odd and my eyes were reacting weirdly to the daylight. I started sensing the telltale signs of a migraine coming on. Total crap when that happens and it happens often enough. I am lucky I took my magic pill in time but I can’t help but get anxious from migraines or odd feelings these days. Is it just a migraine or is it something else? And then ure mind just starts running in the direction of crazy town and you totally lose the plot. I have been sitting here under my blanket thinking about what each of my cells is doing all over my body. Who is doing its job? Who isn’t? It is so frustrating to not know but rather tell yourself repeatedly that everything will be okay. Like last night I had another freak out when my legs starting to feel swollen and heavy. Why were they doing that? What other sinister cause was behind this odd feeling? Anything odd is just so unbelievably terrifying. This sudden heightened sense of awareness may be coming from my own innate fear over the next few weeks. I am doing the big one next week – the big SCAN that I have been dreading. My doctor called last week to discuss it and told me in the nicest possible way “that you can’t hide your head in the sand forever.” Yeah thanks for that advice darling. I know this is routine for someone like me and I am fortunate to be able to be offered such an expensive and in depth scan like this but how else can you feel when your own physician warns you that the process will be “stressful.”  What I am talking about is the PET scan. Now again if you aren’t intimately acquainted with the cancer world you probably think I am talking about a place to take your dog for an x-ray or something! No not quite.

 A PET scan is (according to Wikipedia): Positron emission tomography (PET) ^[1] is a nuclear medicine imaging technique that produces a three-dimensional image or picture of functional processes in the body. The system detects pairs of gamma rays emitted indirectly by a positron-emitting radionuclide (tracer), which is introduced into the body on a biologically active molecule. Three-dimensional images of tracer concentration within the body are then constructed by computer analysis. In modern scanners, three dimensional imaging is often accomplished with the aid of a CT X-ray scan performed on the patient during the same session, in the same machine.

In layman’s terms – if there is a hotbed of cellular activity (i.e.: tumor activity) this machine will find it and find it early. The only problem with such a sensitive machine is that it finds things that look suspicious but aren’t – hence the anxiety surrounding it. You could have hot spots in your brain or lungs just because you can’t stop breathing or thinking but then sometimes they need further investigations to rule other things out. That means biopsies and biopsies are just plain shitty. And then there is the waiting involved. Waiting to find out if everything is ok, waiting and imagining the worst…waiting sucks.

So it is back to C-Town for me next week – September 11^th to be exact. Nice day eh? One friend reassured me by saying that that day had seen more than enough of its share of drama so I would be fine. J This test is very different from the others as you need to actually refrain from physical activity for a few days prior (hello guilt free couch potatoing) and then on the day of you get injected with radiation then are put in a dark room by yourself (no TV, music or books) and have to try and relax for an hour prior to testing. Okay somehow that just doesn’t sound zen-like to me at all. Being alone with my thoughts…hmmm. So I again need bucket loads of positivity coming my way in the lead up to this big day. I am so focusing on the relief I will feel after the scan when everything comes back great. Then I can really move forward and feel good about it. But sometimes it is perfectly okay to be scared out of your mind. If only for a moment or two…

OBB