The Chemo Chronicles

December 14, 2024

Eight years later....  We survived the pandemic, three of the orchid plants are miraculously still alive, my oldest daughter passed, my son is moving to Columbia  and Kipling crossed the Rainbow Bridge last year at the respectable age of 17.  I have quilted up a storm and have quilts piled in every closet and corner.  I have little cartiledge left in my wrists so must wear braces on both hands which is why there will be many typos in spite of proofreading. My days of typing 70 wpm are gone.  Life has been mostly good.  Until recently.  So now there will be the CANCER CHRONICLES. With occasional pictures of cats, quilts, and plants of course.

It started last summer.  I thought I had a piece of grape peel stuck in my throat. I drank a lot of water, gargled with soda pop, but it wouldn't go away. It gave me a sore throat. I'm used to sore throats; I get them with my allergies. Fall arrived and my voice left. Laryngitis I thought but it was still there two weeks later so I made an appointment with the doc. She sent me to the ear, nose, throat doc who carefully threaded the camera tube up my nose and down my throat to take a peek. She used a nasal anasthetic so no pain, thankfully.  The camera showed a paralyzed right vocal cord.  

The next step was a CT scan. They injected the dye in my arm and into the machine I went. A day later we got the results: There was a 2.6 by 1 centimeter tumor growing on my thyroid.  Easy peasy I thought, remove the thing and everything will be normal.  The next call was from the oncology department nurse who said I would need a biopsy, a pet scan, and a chemo port installed.  What?? A chemo port??  Holy shit -- all of a sudden this is starting to sound serious.

The biopsy was almost painless except for the anesthetic novocaine type needle pricks.  The next day the test results came. Lymphoma. Not really what we wanted to hear.  Next on the itinerary of this two week trip was the echocardiogram and ptscan. Then donating lots of blood. I am so proud of myself for not fainting.

    

The echocardiogram was kind of like an hour long mammogram and the pt scan gave me lots of time to read while we waited for the dye to do its thing before I went into the scanner and pretty much napped for 15 minutes.

So now I am holding my breath, waiting for the results of the ptscan, hoping against hope that the lymphoma has not spread.  Hoping that the blood tests and echocardiogram show that I am healthy enough to have chemo. Just crossing my fingers and hoping......

Four days until the appointment with the oncologist.....