Do I Have to do ALL the Thinking Here?

Whew. Despite my anticipation that yesterday might be a tad stressful, I had no idea just how nutso the doctor follies were about to get. It started out well, with my blood pressure finally in the range of low-normal, after a year of all-over-the-place readings, and ho-hum normal blood work. Not anemic. Electrolytes balanced. Blood gases normal.

The night sweats and hot flashes continue to ramp up and make my life miserable in 20-30 three-minute chunks per day, despite the temporary relief given by the spruce lignan supplements a few months back. It's not working anymore. I still have major pain in my back, where the incision begins on the right side under my arm--without the weekly chiropractor adjustments that kept the pain at bay in Washington, I have some level of physical pain everyday. Dr. DaSilva says I need to see Dr. Huddleston about that (the plastic surgeon), as he suspects nerve entrapment by the implant. He still says I seem depressed. (Perhaps I am, especially on days when I have to deliver myself into the maw of medical-land). He says my cancer is in total remission, excellent news.

Wait. What about the results of my chest x-ray, taken just before I left for the west coast, I ask? Normal and clear, right? After much flipping and searching through the chart, he finds the results of the test he ordered the last time he saw me in late September. Oh, looky-there. There's a spot on my lung.

There's a SPOT on my LUNG? And someone presumably read the results of this test and, somehow, didn't have a thought that maybe I should KNOW about this? Once again, I can't trust anyone to PAY ATTENTION. The medicos are all so efficient, ordering tests and filing paperwork to cover their bases, showing that they checked all the boxes and did all the requisite follow-up, but no one ever LOOKS at the results once the procedure is followed. [Rage. Fright].

Yes, he says, we should probably do a CAT scan, even though it's probably nothing. Probably.

I spend the rest of the day in a haze of under-current panic, thrumming along in the back of my head, while I go make appointments for Dr. Huddleston for next week and Dr. Anderson for March, pick up some scar gel, shop for yarn, eat a gargantuan hamburger at Five Guys while listening to the radio, pick up my tamoxifen Rx, all the while feeling very sorry for my sorry self.

Then on the drive home, the voice-memory of Jimmy Stewart speaks to me: "Now-wait-just-a-gosh-darned-minute." I had a chest x-ray in October of 2007, a pre-op check, just before the mastectomy. Dr. DaSilva has all those records from UVA. Wouldn't it be prudent to check and see if there was a spot on my lung in that x-ray and, I don't know, maybe COMPARE the two x-rays to see if this is an old spot or a new spot, at least before we go running off for about another $3,000 in CAT scan madness?

When I finally got home in the late afternoon, I called the nurse and explained about the previous x-ray. She couldn't find it in my chart. I gave her the phone numbers for UVA. An hour later, Betty called back. "Yes," she said, "the spot was there in 2007, and the 2008 x-ray shows that it is now significantly smaller than it was the year before." Ta-da! I asked her to show the two x-ray reports to the doctor and ask if the CAT scan is really necessary, given the new information we now have, (thanks to me).

The moral of the story is: Every test, every time--get the results! Because, no one cares as much about your health as you. Because, you can't be sure that just because you deliver yourself into the arms of the medical profession for their tests and procedures, that someone is actually reading the results and connecting the information into a coherent picture of what's going on with you. I don't know why I have to keep learning this lesson, over and over again, but there it is.

It is any wonder that I might be depressed? It's depressing! After more than a year of this madness and medical run-around, the story is still the same. I'm in limbo. Waiting for the reprieve to end. Waiting for bad news to resurface.

I now have a prescription in hand for a low-dose anti-depressant, which is used off-label for the insufferable, increasing hot flashes, (with the presumed added benefit of making me a more chipper and pleasant patient). I don't know if I will fill it. I balk. Or part of me does.

Now that the wedding is over, and life (as we know it) returns to its day-to-day routine, I am noticing that I'm walking around with a tremendous sense of...nothingness. There are no highs or lows in my life. I'm just floating along, waiting for something to happen. Waiting to return to some semblance of being alive (or waiting for something to go wrong again). Ennui in the extreme. It reminds me of the year following my dad's death, when I felt that all of my emotions had just flat-lined. I didn't feel anything...I was just breathing one breath after another, going through the motions of living. Nothing impacted my disconnected-ness.

I feel that same numbness now. Even my temporary panic yesterday was muted and foggy, like it was happening to someone else. Is happiness in the form of a pill the answer? The nurse just called to tell me that the doctor still wants me to do the CAT scan. Is this for my benefit, or his?

The cancer is gone. So now, what do I do with the rest of my life?