CATscan and first Oncologist visit...

Thursday, we head back to the surgeon.  One piece of paper said to come back in a week, another said two weeks, but then he kinda said a week and a half.  But the scheduler put me in for today, so I am half expecting to be turned away.  I see my surgeon and he says I am healing up nicely.  He tells me to lay back and he will take my bandage off.  The "advice" I got earlier told me this is worse than the surgery.  My whole body tenses up and he grabs the bandage and slowly pulls.  It has all the pain of...peeling off a wet bathing suit.  Boy, do I feel stupid.  Not that I am complaining that I didn't have the excruciating hair pulling pain I was told about.  Maybe it's because sometime under anesthesia I was shaved from my nipples to my kneecaps with just a little landing strip going down my entire left side for some unknown reason.  He tells me to schedule a CATscan, assigns me an oncologist, and sends me on my way (I also got a grape lollipop).  

Anxious for answers, anxious to get on with my life, we ask for the earliest CATscan, regardless of where we have to go to get it.  Tomorrow morning?  Perfect!  We immediately call the oncologist.  Tomorrow afternoon?  Perfecter!!  Everything has been moving so fast, which we are both thankful for.  

I wake up Friday like it is Christmas morning.  I am so excited to finally be on the road to recovery/treatment.  I am also very hungry on this road since I haven't been allowed to eat or drink anything today.  Luckily, they have a nice big jug of slightly orange flavored chalk for me to drink for my test.  For those unfamiliar with this,  the consistency of this wonderful concoction is just slightly more liquid than setting concrete.  I get about a third of it down when they call me back.  That's all I can do.  The nice nurse says that will be enough and tells me to lay down on the sliding table...that doesn't have hand rails...and I can't really bend at the waist.  She looks at me standing there.  I look pitiful.  Then it dawns on her that I need help getting down there.  She comes over and helps me lower myself into position.  She throws a sheet over me and tells me to slide down my shorts so the zipper doesn't show up.  I have a zipper?  Because of the location of my incision and the location of the offending part's removal, I have been wearing over-sized boxer shorts (which look just like shorts) underneath over-sized shorts (which look just like boxer shorts).  Since I want to put as little pressure on the aforementioned areas as possible, I don't wear any that would be tight enough to require the use of a zipper.  Still unable to bend at the waist, I try to shimmy my way out of my shorts.  

The nurse comes over and sticks my vein.  She looks for the one vein that doesn't have a big bruise on it already from the previous two weeks of jabbing and jabs me there.  As she starts the dye, she says I may feel a warm or cold sensation in my arm followed by the taste of garlic in my mouth.  Right on cue, it happens.  First a pleasant little hint of garlic.  Then the sensation of burping after eating a slice of garlic bread.  Then the overwhelming feeling of having just sucked the life force out of eight cloves of garlic followed with a garlicy gargle.  WOW!  I was hungry about 3 seconds ago, but now, not so much.  Then, I am really glad she gives me the next warning.  She says, "Some people will later have the sensation that they have went to the bathroom in their pants.  But don't worry, it's just the dye moving through your system."

She walks out of the room and the scanner begins its whirring.  I think to myself how funny it is that some people feel a little wee down there.  "Take a deep breath."   "Hold."   "Release."  I hear that several times as the slide pushes me in and out of the tube like I am riding on an old mechanical type writer, and then it happens.  "Take a deep breath."  "Hold."  And I just crapped my pants!  "Release."  I think I did already.  Did I crap my pants?  It certainly feels like I am sitting in a pile of crap...well, I don't know exactly what that feels like, but I imagine it feels a lot like I what I am feeling right now.  Dear God, please let this be that side effect she was talking about.  I thought she was talking about a little wee, not a giant mushy poo, which is what I think may have happened.  I keep being pushed in and out of the tube.  I can't check.  I guess when this is over the nurse and I will find out at the same time whether I crapped my pants or if this is just a drill.  At least if I crapped my pants, my shorts will be clean since I had to shimmy.

The test finally ends.  The garlic subsides and the pooing sensation was the dye, either that or me and the poo are now at the same temperature, because I don't feel like I am sitting in anything warm anymore.  The nurse tells me to slide on my shorts and get up.  The problem is, I have shimmied beyond my non-waist-bending reach and cannot pull up my pants until I get up.  Now, how do I ask a nurse to help me up and then I will pull up my shorts without sounding like a bad punchline to a schoolyard joke.  I decide the best thing to do is to lay there and look pitiful.  It works.  I explain, while very slowly in a non-creepy, non-Chris-Hansen-attention-grabbing way, show her that my "underwear" is basically shorts and I need help upright so I can then be able to pull up my shorts shorts.  Luckily, she smiles and says "Oh, I keep forgetting your surgery was just a week ago."  The nice nurse sends me on my way, while telling me about one more side-effect.  I need to drink plenty of fluids to keep from being dehydrated, while staying away from caffeine.  We have a long, heated discussion about what exactly is "staying away" from caffeine (i.e. Pepsi) as she pushes me out in the lobby.  She gives us a CD-ROM of my scans for the oncologist and I KNOW today is going to be a day full of answers!

A couple hours later, I am at the oncologist's office.  It is a large building with several oncologists.  You see people in the waiting room at all stages of care.  We go back to the room and the very nice gentleman sits me down and says "Don't worry, you are going to survive this and be free of cancer."  I start bawling like a little baby, and I don't know why.  I never thought for a second I wouldn't beat this. I don't know why I am crying.  I feel so stupid.  He asks if I had my CATscan yet and we proudly whip out the CD, to which he replies, "Oh, I can't read those.  We'll wait for the results."  He talks about my options.  Twenty to thirty scans over the next ten years, while waiting for results on each one (and possibly really crapping on the table because you think the sensation is just the dye).  We already don't like that one.  Option two is chemo.  Less scans and less chance of anything popping back up.  OK.  Option three is radiation, that may cause more and worse cancer than it kills.  Hmmm.  Option two is sounding better and better.  

We didn't get our answers, but we are on our way.  We met a very nice oncologist and in a few days, everything will be in place.  I wait for my parents to show up for the weekend.  I am looking forward to getting out of the house.  I hydrate all day long, limiting myself to one small Pepsi.  Life is starting to look up.  That is until.  The Wrath of CATscan.....which I will talk about in way too much detail tomorrow.  

"...the best kind of cancer!"

By now in my treatment, I am still walking around hunched over, living icepack to icepack.  My mother-in-law brings me the mail, mainly because my one trip alone to the mailbox resulted in groaning in bed for the next four hours.  Being recently laid off, I open a letter from my previous employer.  The letter states that they never received my severance agreement (that may or may not exist, by decree of the alleged severance agreement I am not allowed to divulge if there was one or not) and my insurance has been canceled.  This is exactly the kind of news you want to received when trying to recover from cancer surgery and enter into treatment.  Basically, this means all but one day of this whole ordeal is not covered.  Luckily (and purely by chance) I happened to be at one of my former employer's largest benefactors when I decided to send in the severance agreement (if in fact it exists, which I can't say) and since it required a witness, one of their employees signed it before I sent it off.  I think that was my only saving grace, that to deny that I sent it in would be to call your largest funding source a liar.  That would not make very good business sense.  Luckily I had all the supporting paperwork to prove that I sent something that I am supposed to deny exists if asked, and they worked hard to push it through and get the insurance reinstated.  I will admit, I did slip in that I was trying to recover from my cancer surgery when I received the letter.  I am not above using cancer pity when it is required.  

The other pit in my stomach that day was waiting for the biopsy from the fugitive testicle.  The doctor had told me he would try to get the results to me Friday, the day after my surgery, but at the latest Monday.  It's four o'clock on Monday and I still hadn't heard.  As I seem to be saying all the time, the hardest part about cancer is the constant hurry up and wait.  And I still have my neighbors "advice" that it may not be cancer after all.  With the pain I am in and the asymmetrical scrotum I now possess, it had better be cancer.  I don't want to have gone through all this for something that could have "hung around" for the rest of my life with no harm to me.  I call the doctor's office and leave a message.  Five o'clock, six o'clock all pass with no news.  

Another thing I find myself doing since I was diagnosed is looking for signs or signals to what is going on.  I saw the nurse practitioners face go white when he realized he misdiagnosed me the first time.  I was trying to read my nurses face during the ultrasound when she finally said, "Don't go by my expressions because I am tired and I had a bad day."  Not exactly what you want to hear from a nurse, but at least I know she wasn't necessarily frowning at my ultrasound.  I was trying to figure out what it meant in the recovery room when they said I wasn't keeping my oxygen levels up high enough.  And now, I am trying to read what it means that the doctor hasn't called on the day he said he would.  Is the news so bad he wants to tell me in person?  I will see a limousine pull up in the driveway, he will get out with two bodyguards to tell me it's super-ultra-mega-cancer, and it was pointless to take it out, because no matter what you do you die?  I don't know what to think, but my mind is running through every possible outcome, most of them negative.  

Half past six the phone rings.  It is my surgeon's nurse stating she got my message and that the doctor will call me tomorrow.  Not much consolation, but at least I know that I have been heard.  Five minutes later, the doctor calls.  He said the biopsy has come back as seminoma.  "It's the best kind of cancer!", he says.  What, the biggest payday for you?  Should I be celebrating and jumping up and down and saying "I'm number one!  I'm number one!  In your face all you sucky sub-par cancer people, I have the BEST cancer in the world!!!"  OK, I knew what he meant, but it still sounded odd being put that way.  He meant that it was very survivable with minimally invasive treatment.  He said, I can just watch things for the next ten years or I could do radiation and not have to watch as close, as well as have some peace of mind that whatever rogue cancer may be floating around is gone.  However, that is IF my CATscan comes back clean.

Here we are again.  Another hurry up and wait.  It seems like all good cancer news comes with a caveat.  The big "IF" that is constantly in every sentence that comes out of the doctor's mouth.  My wife and I discuss things, and we will both sleep better if I do the radiation and know we kicked any hidden cancer's butt.  I set my mind on that.  Psyche myself up for radiation.  Read all I can.  This is going to be a piece of cake!  All I have to do is get a clean CATscan.  That's no big deal though.  I just lay in a tube for a few minutes and it's over.  I couldn't be more wrong!  That, I will discuss tomorrow.