Scan Day

Tomorrow is scan day. My first CT scan since treatments ended.

I'm scared.

Well, I'm not actually scared about the scan itself. I'm scared to hear the results on Monday. Monday will decide whether or not I'll be thankful on Thanksgiving. Monday will decide whether or not I'll have a merry Christmas. Monday will decide whether or not I can hope to have a happy New Year.

The odds of Small Cell Neuroendocrine Carcinoma coming back and/or spreading are higher than I'd like to admit to myself. It's not your average type of cervical cancer. The treatment for Small Cell is very aggressive to combat the level of aggression of the disease itself, but the problem lies in the lack of research and test cases. You see, Small Cell is so rare that the doctors really don't know how to treat it. What I have is basically like a lung cancer in my cervix. The doctors don't know if it's best to treat it like lung cancer or cervical cancer, so they shoot it with both guns and hope for the best. But they don't know what treatment has the highest success rate because there really haven't been enough of us out there to test. Even my surgeon said he'd only ever seen three cases of Small Cell at Sloan Kettering.

I'm a guinea pig.

So, my scan tomorrow will cover everything from my pelvis to my abdomen to my lungs. If the news on Monday is "all clear", I'll be free to live my life for another three months until I'm scanned again. But, if Monday shows return or spread of the cancer, discussions of my options will begin.

Honestly, I don't think I'd be able to handle going through chemo again. I haven't had a treatment since September 30th, and I still don't feel like myself yet. The good news is that my hair is starting to grow back. I almost look like I have really short hair on purpose, instead of having really short hair because it's growing back from nothing. I even noticed some new growth under my armpits, which were the first places to lose it. I'll admit, it was very nice not having to shave for a few months, but I'm not going to complain about starting up that habit again!

Yes, the hair growth is great; and feeling a bit better is wonderful. But the best part about being off of chemo is having my kids back. I don't think it's possible to explain how hard it was to know that I wasn't capable of taking care of my babies. I could barely take care of myself. I saw them when I was feeling up to it, and they even slept over a few times, but it wasn't the same. Now I'm back in their daily lives. I'm cooking for them, helping them with homework, taking them to the doctor, cleaning up after them and doing their laundry.

It's amazing how the things I used to complain about doing have become the things I'm learning to cherish.

I don't want my life to change again. I need to get back to being me. Jimmi and I still have to go on our Honeymoon. We still have 12 frozen embryos sitting in a lab, just waiting for us to be their parents. I'm only 36! There's too much I still need to do! Dealing with the possibility of recurrences, spread, more chemo or dying young are not on my list.

Oh, please, let this scan be clean. I'll be asking again in three months, but for now, I'll take it one scan at a time.

Let it be clean.

Let it be clean.

Let it be clean.