August & September checkups

As I prepare to leave for my October visit at MD Anderson, it occurs to me that I should write about a health update. I did not have a scan in August, but there were no weird symptoms or anything to be overly concerned about. However, the night before/ morning of August my checkup with the oncologist, I woke up in the middle of the night needing to pee so badly that only a little girl on her first road trip with dad can understand the level of discomfort. I tried to see if I could delay for a minute because I was clearly still more than half asleep. At some point I must have struck up the energy to get up and walk toward the bathroom. I woke up on the carpet with blood everywhere. I had no idea where I was for a moment and in the dark the blood looked like black liquid. When I figured out what was going on, I then crawled over to where my phone was charging and called Cassie, who was down on the first floor. When there was no answer, I started to crawl back toward the bathroom because I still had to go in the worst way. By the way, stone tile is hard and cold when you are crawling to the toilet. By the time I crawled back to the bedroom and to my phone, it was ringing. Cassie had woken up and saw that I'd called. I said, "I must have gotten up and fallen and I've cut myself." She ran up the two flights to check on me. She later said that she figured it was just a scratch or something. However, it was actually a gash in my chin that was so alarming to her, the three people at the front desk of the ER, and the doctors. If you'd only seen the horrified look on all of their faces! I'm pretty sure the medical staff aren't supposed to greet you with a gasp and mouth and eyes wide when they see your injury.

Both the doctor who stitched me up and the attending were adorable and I told Cassie that if I was going to go to such lengths for her to meet cute doctors, she needed to at least get their numbers. We were in a trauma center, so while we were there we saw more than one rush of trauma level 1 situations, plenty of cops who came in with those cases, and we were notified via news app that there had been a shooting in a parking garage "near the med center." The doctor had to reassure us that the medical center is a big area, and that incident was a few miles from where we were. 

Five hours later, I had countless dissolving stitches inside the gash and seven external stitches. The doctors determined that the fall was probably due to low blood pressure and/or being mostly asleep. Cassie and I had just worn our pjs to the ER, me in my housecoat. We joked about this the entire time we were there, but then we saw a young woman with a patient nearby who was wearing a super short house "jacket." I call it a house jacket because there was nothing to it and she wasn't wearing pants. It was a full on cultural experience in the trauma center. 

The most upsetting part for me was that I had to see my oncologist later in the day and I was worried that the treatment team would be alarmed. Falling can be a sign of tumor progression, but there were other plausible reasons and we just went with that. Lois and I saw Dr. No Naps after lunch, He was not so concerned about progression, but he was concerned about my weight, blood pressure, etc. He just told me to stay hydrated, to not stand up too abruptly, and to gain weight. Since then my chin has healed with just a small scar (my immune system must be working in some capacity) and I've gained 5 pounds!!! As far as the moving more slowly to avoid blood pressure drops goes, it's again all about mindfulness. By being mindful of everything I'm doing as much as possible, I can make sure I'm breathing deeply, relaxing my core, and going slowly enough that I won't end up on the floor from a sudden drop in blood pressure. So far, so good for patient compliance!

At my September appointment, I had an mri. The scan showed that my two trouble spots were again illuminated and one of the spots was a little different. However, since radiation damage and other treatment damage can cause necrotic or damaged tissue, and since we are still within the window of when that can show up, we again have no idea what is going on. We've, of course, been down this road before. The radiologist suggested an mri spectroscopy, which is useful for identifying necrotic or damaged tissue versus active tumor. We've been down this road before. We lived this exact path in 2017. Back then the spectroscopy came back that the areas were both necrosis and some tumor. When I finally had a surgery in September of 2017, those results were validated. The tissue was mostly necrosis with some active tumor. All of that was removed, so now we will see what the spectroscopy says this time. The scan is scheduled for tomorrow (10/10/2018), so I thought I needed to catch everyone up before we see those results.