A little good news for your stocking

I told you this wouldn't always be a gloomy place

This won’t be a long post, but one to break the monotony of waiting. My PET scan was on Monday, and this morning my wife and I talked to my oncologist about the results. The short version is: we’re not yet to full remission.

The longer version is much better, however. This isn’t quite the equivalent of those YouTube videos people post where the title looks like “this is the end! gnash teeth and tear burlap!” but in reality they’re just changing the frequency of posting, or some such thing.

Clickbait from one of my favourite YouTube channels, Jolly. Turns out they were just saying farewell to their studio and moving into a bigger space. Don’t worry, I wouldn’t do that to you, dear reader.

The scan, overall, was excellent. The tumour has shrunk significantly, which is good but actually somewhat unnecessary for achieving a favourable result. The key is that there should not be any cancerous activity in the tumour (or anywhere else for that matter). What showed up on the scan was a tiny amount of metabolic activity in the tumour. I am pleased to say, though, that I’m much closer to remission than not; in fact, in the scale used for this sort of thing, where 1-3 are “clear” and 5 and above are “uh oh”, I’m just barely over the line of 3 into 4: “nearly there”.

There is—thankfully—a very good chance that this either reflects 1) residual inflammation from all the treatment, both the radiation and the t-cells chomping away, and/or 2) a tiny amount of cancer still being worked on by the Terminator-esque t-cells. For this sort of treatment, there were always three options on the table for results: either it was going to be completely ineffective, completely effective, or something in-between. This isn’t really the case with something like chemo; it either works or it doesn’t. But these t-cells, it seems, are more like me: deliberate, but slow. That’s fine. You may recall that the sloth is my life mascot, and the mascot for this journal. And that will continue to be the case.

There are after-effects of this treatment that are serious and important, but to say that they’re worth the cost is a flippant understatement. I will likely need weekly blood infusions for many years to help my body recover the ability to produce infection-fighting white blood cells (b-cells), all of which—good and bad—were basically wiped out during the course of this treatment. But I don’t care. I’ll need bloodwork forever, probably. But I don’t care. I’ll need to be re-immunized for literally everything. Poor Charles from elementary school, thinking those hepatitis vaccinations would forever be in the past…. But I don’t care. You’ll only very rarely get to lay eyes upon my spectacular moustache because I’ll have to continue masking everywhere. But I don’t care.

What I do care about is being so, so close to getting my life back. I am feeling so much better—that internal sense of dread related to the previous two scans I had is not present. For once, feeling better may actually correspond to being better. We’ll need to be a little more patient, but it was incredible to hear my doctor’s happy/optimistic tone of voice when relaying this news rather than just the flat, “news is value-neutral” tone.

Annoyingly, I’m still waiting to be even close to 100%. So far a great deal of this recovery period after my infusion has been taken up by a respiratory illness that morphed into pneumonia (so I can scratch that one off the bingo card now). And I coughed so much and so hard during the pneumonia adventure that I have torn/strained/somethinged my left oblique muscle. Honestly, it was at the point of overwork anyway since when I had my biliary port in the right side, the left was doing all the work. And now it has, at least temporarily, given up the ghost. I’m mainly thankful that the injury didn’t pop up on the scan as something relating to my bones (again) or the lymphoma. Nope, I’m just going to tell people that I injured it swinging home runs at a batting cage or something.

That’s all for now. I probably won’t write again until after Christmas. I hope your Advent and Christmastide are meaningful for you, wherever you are, and whatever or however you celebrate. Advent has been a good time to receive this news, and I hope it is for you as well. I don’t have many fond memories of Christmas growing up, but there’s a chance I’m entering into a new personal liturgical calendar of thanksgiving.

Thanks for reading, as always.