First, I had an electrocardiogram or ECG. It only took 20 minutes. Using ultrasound, my tech Robbie was able to show me exactly how my heart was beating (nice and slow) and how well the blood was being moved by my heart (not as well, but low normal). It was all completely wonderful and cool to watch, at least until Robbie asked if I had been sick earlier this year. I was horribly sick during the last part of the CrossFit Open in late March/early April. Supposedly there's a possibility the virus attacked my heart, and I'm still recovering from that. There's also the alternative possibility that the reduction in function was from a previous encounter. There are a handful of times since high school that I've felt as sick as I did this past winter and had fatigue that stretched on for months. Under this kind of medical scrutiny, maybe I am not quite as healthy as I once thought. Robbie suggested long walks as a form of exercise. Grrrrrr. I like long walks just fine, but I don't consider them much of a workout. This has me worried.
Why was this test ordered? The ECG is a pre-chemo baseline, and I will be having them every 3-4 months on my year of chemo. The drugs I will be taking can further reduce and potentially damage my heart function. I do not like this one bit. I do not want to feel like, act like or be treated like an invalid during this little cancer adventure, so I'm going to be asking some precise questions about exercise tomorrow. I still want to move mountains.
 |
| "For me, life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer." - Arnold Schwarzenegger |
Second, I had a PET/CT scan from skull to thigh. It was not exactly a trip to the spa, but it wasn't horrible. There is a smoothie to drink. Vanilla was lovely. People apparently have mixed feelings about the berry, so I'm glad I picked it. I was covered in warmed blankets, injected with a radioactive isotope, and left to relax in a darkened room in a comfy recliner for 45 minutes. No texting or reading, since your brain gets to have glucose first and we don't want a false positive. No exercising the day before either, because the muscles love having sugar to workout the lactic acid and repair the fibers. No, the only thing we wanted to feed that vanilla barium-sugar smoothie to was cancer cells. Cancer cells love glucose and if the other priority glucose functions (brain activity, significant muscle repair) are not occuring, the cancer cells will gobble that sugar up before healthy cells. The PET CT is very sensitive, so we are hoping that if there is anything that is detectable, the scan will show it. After marinating in my radioactive isotopes for 45 minutes, the scan itself only took about a half hour, about 10 minutes for CT and 20 minutes for PET. It is two scans done on the same machine, and they overlay the images after you are done with both. You lay extremely still, wrapped like a pig in a blanket, while an automatic bed tray moves you in and out of a tiny hole in this enormous white machine in a very chilly room. I had my warm blankets though, so I was fine. There were times where I literally felt like the blood vessels in my head or hands were moving, as if magnetized, when the machine would pass over. I left feeling a bit gassy and headachey, but after some breakfast and water I was ok later that day, just tired.
Why this test? The PET CT is looking for metastasis of cancer any place else. While cancer typically shows up first in the lymph nodes (and mine were clear under ultrasound), it could go elsewhere. Cancer cells can travel by lymph vessels or by blood vessels to sites far away from the original mass. Given the way I feel about my odds, I don't want to leave anything to chance. If we can see whether the cancer has gone elsewhere, I want to see it.
Results should be available to my doctors by this evening, so we'll see what they have to say tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment