Scan No. 3

The day of waiting... and waiting...

This day, Todd, mom, and myself drove to Brigham and Women's Hospital for my third scan. What we didn't know then was that Dana-Farber is much more efficient at scanning than Brigham and Women's. Well, we know now.

I was taken into the back around 1220pm... my appointment was at 11am. Then, instead of getting a sweet room with a TV in it to wait to become radioactive... they put me in a room/hallway in a stiff recliner, inject me, and tell me they'll be back in an hour. Torture. I stared at the wall in front of me and tried to overhear the patient in the next room. How old was he? What type of cancer did he have? I never found out... but he had a good sense of humor... which basically comes with the territory so it wasn't anything new.


I'm going to be late for my 230pm appointment with Dr. Fisher. That means more waiting. Great. The scan goes by pretty quickly... it's much less tortuous now that I keep my arms down to prevent them from falling asleep. When I get out of the scan I find mom and Todd in the waiting room with guilty looks on their faces. In case you forget, before a scan I cannot eat for 6 hours. Well, my little escorts that day decided they couldn't wait any more and went out to lunch while I lay inside a cold metal scanning machine.

So I'm starving. We walk over to Dana-Farber to meet with Dr. Fisher. We wait some more here. I don't know what time I was finally called. When the nurse takes my vitals, my blood pressure was so low that she had to feed me a plan, dry, turkey sandwich on white bread.

When we see Dr. Fisher he doesn't have much to say. He can't view my scan because it's not on the medical server yet but he assumes it's clean just like the last one. Despite my reservations about radiation, Dr. Fisher insists that if I opt out of it, that I will need 4 more cycles of chemotherapy (that's 8 treatments!). Great. So basically, I'm shittouttah... options.

We drop Todd off at his pad in Somerville and I cry because I'm so pissed off... about everything.