No Evidence of Disease

The lead-up to this PET scan was especially difficult for me. The ALKies call it “scanxiety.” It feels like having your mortality tested. Every thought attached to my mortality races through my head in the two weeks leading up to the PET scan. I feel like Eeyore with a cloud of sadness and anxiety hanging over me.

My therapist and I try to document the feelings and thoughts that come up and develop strategies for coping through the few weeks, but mostly it’s just about allowing time to pass and reaching the day when I know I’ll have results.

I had my PET scan at Kaiser West LA at 7 a.m. and met Hadassah for breakfast afterward. Then Chris and I went to Santa Barbara for the day. We took PCH the whole way. As a huge fan of the beach, it was a really peaceful drive and view. Chris and I get about 30 minutes a day, if we are lucky, to ourselves, so having a whole day just with him was wonderful. We went to the salt cave, had massages, and relaxed. We ate dinner at this cute New Orleans/Southern restaurant on State Street.

The way results work is the radiology report drops into my portal, and I get an email to alert me. My scan was on Saturday morning, so I was good all day Saturday. But Sunday night the anxiety hit. It’s hard to remain calm when your mortality report is due back. I had an appointment scheduled with my oncologist that Tuesday morning. The report still hadn’t come in by the time I left for my oncology appointment. Sunday and Monday felt like 600 years, and I was mentally exhausted walking into my appointment on Tuesday morning.

Chris went with me that morning. I started to go down the rabbit hole of fear. I didn’t have a report back because it was so bad they wanted to talk about it with me in person, and she didn’t want to release it to me. It turns out the radiology department was just backed up, and Dr. Anana needed to call to get it rushed that morning so that we’d have something to talk about.

My meeting with Dr. Anana went really well. We looked at the pictures from the scan together. The Christmas tree my body was last November was now just a regular-looking body. She said I could switch to scans every four months now if I wanted because there was no active disease showing. It felt reassuring but it didn’t hit me until we were pulling out of the parking lot, and the radiology report came in, and I read the words myself that said “No Evidence of Active Disease.” I broke down. Chris is used to me crying over everything, and he couldn’t understand why I was crying now after we’d just left the appointment where I was already told this. Seeing those words myself allowed the information to sink in and understand that I’m not dying today. I passed my mortality test. Today, Cancer isn’t killing me.

In the month and a half since this, it has felt like the burden of living with terminal cancer has been lifted a bit. I’m able to imagine a world where I get to watch my boys grow up, and I have had multiple days in a row where I forget I have cancer. It’s not an invading thought for the first time since my diagnosis.

October is a busy month. The little ones turn 1 on the 17th. My 11-year anniversary of quitting smoking was on the 1st (this lung cancer is completely unrelated to smoking, and I have now been a nonsmoker longer than I was a smoker). Our 2nd LA ALKies get-together was this past weekend. I’m speaking at the Genentech conference (the pharmaceutical company that makes my medicine) in San Diego next week. I have 2 escrows that have been particularly hard transactions closing next week, and my 1-year cancerversary is on the 27th.

At the end of the day, I am so fortunate that this is such an amazing life.