It's not just the waiting...

Despite my current readership of two, I was feeling embarrassed about the melodrama of counting down the hours until my PET scan. Obviously, it's not the scan -- it's the result. Then my doctor called. It was a few hours after the test, and I had brought my son home from school. When I recognized the doctor's voice on the phone -- she never calls -- for a brief, lurching moment I was exhilarated. She had called to spare me an extra day of waiting for the good results. How considerate of her! Instead, she had two pieces of information for me: the first was that one of my lungs had collapsed, the second was that some lymph nodes behind my belly (retroperitoneal, a word impossible to spell, pronounce or, for me, comprehend) had begun swelling. My cancer has spread. It's not melodrama if it's your life.