Dying Is Not An Option – Installment 11
Time to catch everyone up on my leukemia progress. I returned to the Mayo in Scottsdale for my three-month checkup on June 20th. Time flies, or . . . so they say. This time I had to undergo another series of CAT scans of my lymphatic system along with more blood tests. The fruit berry iodine drink was actually good in comparison to the green crap I’d had to drink for the first scans! It was ice cold and tasted pretty good. Another plus for the ‘Mayo Way’ of doing stuff. Sooo much easier and thoughtful for their patients.
My cheerful and energetic doctor was on time for my three-month appointment and he informed me (with a twinkle in his eye) that my blood tests were back down to levels of six months ago. The scans of my lymphatic system would be ready the next day. If he found anything abnormal or troublesome with the scans, he would call me right away. He was very proud of the fact that I had gone through the knee replacement surgery so smoothly and had recovered so quickly. So, my three-month leukemia checkup was a winner and good news for me. Finally, good news!
After my appointment with my oncologist, Danny and I went to Cabela’s sporting goods store in Phoenix to take in the huge world of camping, boats, clothing, and other . . . Danny stuff. Danny has made so many sacrifices for me of late; I wanted to show lots of enthusiasm and energy for something he wanted to do. Finally! I helped him pick out a lot of nice clothes with his Father’s Day gift certificates, and I found the store to be awesome and entertaining, even though I’m not all that interested in roughing it except from the suite of a luxury hotel. We looked at lots of boats, and I found a couple that I liked. One of my favorite things to do is to be out on the water, driving a speeding boat myself, feeling the wind race through my hair and sprays of stinging water hitting my face. It’s invigorating! It’s life! It’s fast!
After sightseeing and shopping through out the entire lower level of the store, (which is massive and awesome in scale) . . . I sat at the foot of a huge mountain inside the building, with all kinds of stuffed animals placed just so on the ledges and the crooks and crannies of the mountain. Next to where I was sitting was a large stuffed moose, standing within a pool of water with live fish swimming all around his massive feet. Danny had gone upstairs on the escalators to prowl, so I just sat by the pool of water and felt an empathy of sorts for the stuffed animals and birds all around me. They were beautiful and majestic, but I still felt some sort of kinship and sorrow that they were inside the building and not outside in the sunshine and air of the forest trees, alive and well, thank you! (The live, very fat fish in the pool were great, and the store’s giant aquariums of fish species were truly a sight to behold.) Very impressive!
The day after my appointment and sightseeing tour, my oncologist called me at home (never a good sign) and told me the scans of my nodes were fine, but . . . they could see a potential troublesome mass within my lower colon. He relayed that he thought it might be an infection or blockage resulting from my knee surgery, and called in some massive antibiotics for me to take as a first line of defense. After three days of taking the antibiotics, the nodes on the right side of my face and right ear have begun to swell with a giant sized node-lump protruding outward from beneath the skin near my face. The hard node continues on down to my neckline, and ends beneath my earlobes. The lump is plainly visible in the mirror. It looks a little like I have childhood mumps again. The swelling is causing a lot of pain and discomfort in my jaw. It hurts just to open my mouth and the inner ear is swollen and painful as well. (I’m almost fully deaf in that ear.)
I called the Mayo this morning and my doctor will return my call sometime today. The lower stomach and groin pain I was experiencing prior to my Mayo visit have not subsided, so the mass in my intestines may be more serious than any of us want to believe or think about. If the pain doesn’t subside in my lower stomach and groin area with the antibiotics, it’ll be colonoscopy time. Yuck!
Personally, I think the swollen glands are my immune system’s way of rebelling against the large dose of antibiotics, and the glands are swelling massively, trying to send out a message of some kind. Either I’m allergic to the medicine, or the mass in my colon isn’t an infection and the antibiotics aren’t doing a darned thing except affecting the glands. Time will tell. One thingy . . . and one day at a time is all I can manage to deal with at this time in my lifespan.
More later . . .