Friday was my consult for the CT I took Monday. Let's just say it was a bad meeting. I was nervous about it on Thursday. I had been off chemo for three months and I knew there had to be some change in the situation that I was not going to appreciate. Friday mornings my wife and I go to breakfast and we did this past Friday as well. I was so tensed out about the consult that I actually had tears in my eyes through breakfast. We got to the consult at the proper time and then we waited.

We waited for an hour. The oncologist finally came in and he was a little off his usual demeanor. He had read over the radiologist's report and had to call him back because the report was for a pancreatic cancer that was in the middle of the pancreas, not where my cancer was. So he had to cajole the radiologist to re-evaluate my CT. The determination was that the mass had not increased in size. The blood work showed that my CA-19s had gone from 225 to somewhere around 641. That is bad, comparatively it is still in a comfort zone of sorts (it can got o 20,000 or higher), but still having increased by a factor of three, I was not at all happy with the news. The determination was made that I will go back on chemotherapy after the first of the year, the full regimen, Taxotere, Gemxar and Xeloda. That means my hair will fall out again and my finger nails will go yellow again and all the other outward signs of being in chemo. Not to mention having to go through days of feeling like roadkill and losing my mental ability to do much of anything. Chemo sucks and I have no good feelings about facing it again except it is necessary to kill this little demon inside me. But I don't go on chemo until after the holidays, sort of a lackadaisical emergency, plenty of time to contemplate the onset of chemical hell.

Needless to say by the time I left the cancer center I was destroyed, in tears, bummed out, and feeling like I was at the bottom of my spirit. It has been 48 hours now and I am just now starting to get some wind in my sails again. I have gotten some notes from friends and calls from relatives. That all makes me feel better, but the actual analysis of where and how the consult went wrong is the process that let me see how the situation could have been mitigated and from there how I needed to adjust my perception. (Boy, talk about rationalizations!) I had to re-examine every aspect of that consult to see that the situation was really not so bad, just delivered in a way that accentuated every negative aspect there was. I knew my CA-19s might go up, I knew I was going back on chemo sometime, just when was the question. Finding out my radiologist had either misread my CT or reported on the wrong CT leaves me without much faith in his ability. That the doctor had not read the report prior to me showing up at the cancer center leaves me a little uneasy. But they are humans and overworked besides, and I guess these things happen. It was a aggregation of bad events and unpleasant news that left me pretty much devastated. I am climbing out of the hole this Sunday morning feeling like I might actually live, if not without cancer today, then maybe sometime in the future rather than dying. It's the small things in life that eventually make you happy.

Now I have to go mow the lawn and do yard work. Those are little joys of life so unappreciated by people who have never had death tapping its toe in front of them and checking its watch every few seconds. Don't ever let anybody tell you that death is patient. The little bastard is quite impatient. And he gets pissy when denied his harvest.