Round two, clean bones

I had my second infusion a week ago. I've been waiting this week until I felt pretty sure I could say this: this round was a bit easier than last time.

Yeah, kind of surprised. But I'll take it.

I am not sure if the anticipation of it probably being harder made me think it was not so bad, or what, but I definitely did not have more than a couple half-hour periods where I could say with certainty that I felt crappy.  Note that I didn't exactly feel good, but I certainly wasn't approaching anything acute in terms of my complaints.

Things were a bit different this time: it was all about the GI system. I had, and continue to have, a sensitive stomach.  Nothing too bad, just a little ache in the gut that persists at a low level. The first few days of digestion were clearly off, and food wasn't always appealing, but it wasn't bad enough to keep me from eating.  I still didn't have any real nausea, but the little hint of food aversion I did have made me not want that to develop (my nurses have drilled it into me to preempt nausea at the first sign, as it is such a specific sensation that your body remembers it and will develop anticipation responses that make it worse in the future), so I did end up taking my anti-nausea medicine about four times (over four days).  Still: pretty good, I'd say.

Last time, I had backache for a few days, whereas this time I just had some femur pain - quickly knocked out by Tylenol. And my energy has been pretty darn good!

But the real news of the week is that I had a bone scan that came back clean. HUGELY GOOD NEWS.

Back when I was being fast-tracked into the chemo clinical trial they ordered a CT and bone scan for me, but they couldn't get the bone scan scheduled. Then, I didn't get into the trial, and my oncologist just had me start chemo that Friday. Because my CT was clean, I guess wasn't really worried about the bone scan.

However, when I saw my oncologist last week, I told her that since I had blown threw my deductible for the year it would be a good time to order any other tests.  She thought we should go ahead and do the bone scan, and ordered it for Tuesday of this week. I asked her if cancer ever gets into bones without getting into organs and she said that was actually the more common place for metastasis to start.

So then I started to worry. With my nodal involvement and the fact that some of my nodes were not "contained" (meaning, the cancer was beginning the march out of them to do their nefarious work elsewhere) suddenly it struck me as a very real possibility that my bones may have cancer in them.

This cast a pall over the weekend.  As you know, the gravity of my situation has revealed itself in degrees, so there was nothing in my mind that could conquer the thought that this was yet another level of reality I needed to adjust to. My mind engaged with the what if, and the what if became the internal dialogue for the week. By Tuesday, I was walking around with the angel of death very close over my head. 

Breast cancer that has metastasized to the bones is something people can live with, sometimes for a long time, but as I understand it, it also is very definitely not going away. Ever.

As I sat in the scanner, I imagined myself held in the arms of healing armies of angels/beings and focused on acceptance of my ultimate safety and the beauty of my life, in any case. 

When I didn't get a call from anyone by Wednesday night, I started to exhale. Typically, if there is a "significant finding" on a test, your MD calls the next day, and we knew this test had a 24 hour turnaround at longest. If normal, it gets logged into your file and the nurse may or may not notice it and get back to you when he/she does.

I actually didn't hear from the nurse until last night when she left messages saying "Nothing to worry about - just have some test results for you. Call me back tomorrow or when you can." 

Another exhale.

It wasn't until I heard her say the word "normal" today that I fist-pumped and whooped.

Feel free to join me.