Waiting, and waiting, and waiting

and waiting and waiting. Seems like it can be an eternity, but yet when the phone finally does ring I never want to actually hear what the Dr. on the other line has to say. I suppose that's a by-product of my "the glass is always half empty so that way if someone fills it up you're really happy" point of view.

So I waited. The scans were done on Wed. April 30th and I had an appt. w/ Dr. Sato on Friday May 2nd where he would have the "preliminary" results and we would be able to discuss my starting Sutent.

May 2nd was a pretty good day, or at least the beginning of it was. When I arrived and saw him he started babbling on about the protocol we were going to set up for Sutent and when I would come see him next. When I asked him about the results he said "oh we don't have the final report yet, but I'm not concerned." I thought o.k. that's good enough for me. Later in the day though after we'd left and started our trek back home I started to get curious, did they get the final report, what exactly did it say? So I called the nurse who handles my case and was told that I would need to speak to Dr. Sato himself about the results, and that more or less things were the same as they had been in my previous MRI. I wrote my doc an email (great guy too because he actually responds to emails) and he told me he would be in touch after the final report came in and to go ahead as planned getting the various heart and blood tests I needed done as baseline for starting the chemo. It was a stressful weekend.

Monday morning came and went, but by Monday afternoon I felt like I either needed a stiff drink or a few, two, three of my anti-anxiety meds (specially prescribed to help me supposedly be less anxious about having cancer) to get through the rest of the day. The waiting was killing me, so I called the place I had the tests done and was told that the final report had been completed. I set off from work to go pick up the report myself. Now, if you read the previous post where I went and picked up the report and freaked out because it had something on it, you could imagine my family's hesitance for me to go and pick this one up. Especially b/c there was a slightly different circumstance surrounding my MRI. Dr. Sato had instructed me to get my scan done at the same place as I had the previous time, but because of the squished and expedited time schedule I had to get it done at the place that would take me the soonest, which was not the same location. Due to this I was warned that sometimes different machines/ different radiologists measure and see things differently , blah blah blah. So my mom kept reminding me that if I picked up the report I should keep that in mind. She also insisted that I wait for my father to meet me at the hospital before reading the reports (luckily he was working near Boston that day). So he met me, we got the reports, and I got depressed.

The MRI showed that the area in my liver was measured at 6.5mm this time compared to the 5-5.5mm it had supposedly been in March. My mind obviously settled into the worst case scenario, metastasis to the liver a mere couple months after my initial diagnosis. I felt myself for the first time screaming about how unfair this all was, that I couldn't even be so lucky as to have a little time off from the intial diagnosis before it becoming stage 4 battle for my life gladiator style. I was pissed, depressed, heartbroken, and utterly just broken, period. I felt like I hadn't even gotten a chance to fight and the fight was already getting harder. Like I was going into it with a severe handicap.

My dad tried to be reasonable with me and explain that we really didn't know anything because we had to wait for Dr. Sato and his team to compare the MRI cd's and determine whether or not it was true growth or just the x factor of having been done at a different location. I figured I would hear from him Tuesday.

One of the most positive things that has come out of this whole experience occurred that night though, I got to spend unwarranted/uncounted/and completely uncensored time with my dad. We talked about things that I'd never thought to talk to him about before, philisophical crap and real stuff, we talked for hours about the meaning of life and what we're each meant to do. I quizzed him on how he dealt with my illness and what made him able to cope since I was having such a hard time finding any ground to put my feet on. Don't get me wrong my dad and I have always been close, but this was different, this was me sharing an emotional part of myself and being able to share that with him was incredible. Obviously cancer at a young age brings about a lot of ideas of mortality much sooner than I think most 20-year olds would consider, and it felt relieving to discuss things with him, instead of glazing over and talking about other matters.

Tuesday alas came and went as well, with no word from the doctor's office. I reached out and asked all my friends, family, extended online support family, to keep me in their thoughts and prayers in this difficult time.

Wednesday morning the Dr. office called, and as I held baited breath the nurse said "Could you tell me where you got your MRI and the phone number? Dr. Sato wanted to see the final report."

WHATTTTT! Here I was ready to contemplate my tombstone and he hadn't even gotten the report yet! I sent him a little email inquiring as to the delay and was told to fax the report over to his personal line and that he would call me on Thursday after looking at the results and comparing the cd's.

Yet another day to wait.