The doughnut leaves a bitter taste
Cancer Blogging continues. There’s an introduction, if you haven’t read it.
Having the tumour removed was a Good Thing, but it might not be enough. The cancer may have spread. The most likely location is round the back of the kidneys where it’s hard to get at, if I understand correctly. It’s not always easy to find information because there’s a huge industry in selling alternative medicines to treat cancer. To find the information it helps if you know exactly the right keywords to search on, and if I knew that then I wouldn’t need to search. The CT scanner is a bit like one of those beds you see on Star Trek. You lie down and an x-ray device spins round scanning your body to build up a 3D map. On Star Trek it looks like a convenient table over the patient. In real-life it looks like a giant doughnut. “Not like a bed on Star Trek” might be a better description. Definitely un-Treklike is the preparation for the scan. In any proper hospital you’d be beamed into the bed, or possibly just scanned by a tricorder. I never saw anyone on Star Trek being asked to drink a ‘contrast medium’ first.
For this scan the contrast medium was 750ml (a pint and a quarter) of a watery white liquid. Initially it tastes a bit like sour milk. It wouldn’t be too bad if it came with more of a taste of lemon. It’s not pleasant, but it would be possible to down it quickly without too much fuss. But you can’t do that. It has to spread around your body, so you have to drink it, in sips, over about an hour and a half. The sips mean that the taste rests on your tongue, and what was sour quickly tastes more rancid. I was worried I was going to bring it all back up. I don’t know if that would mean starting all over again.
Once the drink is drunk and you’re lying on the bed, you’re asked to stay still. Lay with a tube hooked into one of my veins, because the contrast medium is not enough. They also have a dye which they warn you about. I lay back, heard the whirring and the clunk of the pump. It wasn’t too bad as the doughnut went up and down. I felt a bit of warmth from the dye, but nothing too bad. It could have been warmth from my imagination though, because there was no doubt when the dye started again. It heats up the blood and that gives you the sensation of wetting yourself, without actually doing so. It also pumps a metallic taste into your tongue, which might have been worse had it not been for the rancid drink occupying my taste buds. The actual scanning took about five minutes.
A week later it was back for the results. It could have been on a better day for me, because the next day was my viva, an oral exam which would decide if I passed or failed my PhD. My mind was more on that. The impression I got was that the cancer hadn’t spread. To be safe she recommended a dose of chemotherapy. As it stood my survival chances over ten years were 80%. With chemotherapy they’d rise to 95% or higher. When you factor in road accidents, stabbings and asteroid strike, that’s about normal for a 35 year old male. That was scheduled to start as soon as possible, but there were some things that needed to be done. Chemotherapy is known for its side effects, and seeing as I didn’t have any children it was recommended I take up sperm banking.
Useful Links:
The Anitkythera Mechanism – which had a CT scan.
Comments