Keep Calm and Restage

 

I´m not supersticious. I´m a scientist. C´mon, I know better than to be nervous about Friday 13th. But I would still have preferred another date for my restaging MRT. Cause tomorrow at 8 am (bah that´s way too early for anything, especially a MRT!) I will be pushed into that narrow, stuffy tube for long loooong 45 minutes listening to the noise and rattling of the magnets moving around me and the occasional breathing commands coming from the medical technician over headphones. I don´t have claustrophobia, but it´s easy to feel a slight panic lying there, no room to move, no way to escape and then be told to hold your breath for 30 seconds or longer.

The MRT at my clinic.

We will take pictures of my chest and stomache to see how CHOEP has changed the status of my cancer. For my type there are no tumor markers in the blood or anything where you can see the stage, the only way to capture that is with imaging techniques. The reasons we´re doing a MRT and not a CT is that it´s radiation-free (wouldn´t want to get cancer from radiation now, would we? ;)) and with MRT it´s also possible to determine the cell density which makes it easier to distinguish between cancer cells and healthy cells. I guess for older patients they wouldn´t usually go all this way but my doc seemed quite determined to get the best imaging available (he would even make a PET-CT if necessary). Sometimes it´s good to be young and therefore recipient of that extra mile. ;)


I guess someday next week we will have the results. There are three ways it can go- complete remission (CR, cancer´s basically gone), partial remission (PR, cancer´s still there but detectable lesser) or no change (NC, well, that´s self-explanatory ;)). Funny thing is, it doesn´t matter which way it goes cause the treatment plan won´t change either way. I will receive the full-on, in your face, we won´t leave a trace of anything cancerous behind treatment no matter what CHOEP did. The answer to high recurrence rate is BEAM in any way but for sure I would feel waaaay more comfortable knowing that the past weeks with CHOEP weren´t totally in vain.

So to be honest, I´m nervous like hell about restaging and that it´s Friday 13th doesn´t help with that. At all. But as long as Jason´s not waiting for me when I get out of the tube, I think I´ll be fine. :)

And doctors and nurses, too, Jason. They really do.

P.S.: The last time I was in the MRT tube it was actually kinda awesome. In university I had a course called bioanorganic chemistry and so I know a few things about how a MRT works (it´s basically a proton NMR of the water molecules in your body *nerd mode off* ;)). So I couldn´t stop grinning like a mad girl because I got to experience this awesome science directly with my own body. I mean, that technique is genius! I did a lot of H-NMR in my days but to have the idea to use it for medical purposes? Awesome. Yay science and smart people who know how to make the world better with it! :)