Quick morning doing my usual tattoo show and tell with the folks in the lab while they sucked a whole lot of blood out of me for various tests. I love them. They are so fun for a group that is stuck in a maze of tiny little cubbies full of sick people all day long.
They got me in and out in a hurry and then I hustled over to the clinic to talk about about results. I wish I was video recording their faces when I told them I was doing 20-50 mile bike rides regularly. I don’t think they hear stuff like that too often from patients. My neuropathy is improving, which we’re all happy about. My fingers are mostly OK and instead of meat bricks my feet feel like I am walking in sand-filled shoes all the time, but no pain. Hope that keeps getting better.
All my bloodwork was normal except my CEA result. CEA (carcinoembryonic antigen) is a tumor marker that should not really ever be above 3. Mine is 8. Which is annoying, but you hear stories about folks with triple-digits and I am not complaining. There are some really wacky folks with levels as high as 30 without any cancer at all. False positive is possible, though rare. Mine has been climbing steadily since surgery, but very slowly, and scans show nothing so the course of action is to just wait and see. The ctDNA results in a couple weeks should help give a better idea as well.
The thing about colon cancer is even with an elevated CEA number, if there’s nothing to actually aim at, there’s not a lot to do. I don’t have any spots anywhere they can attack and I don’t have any symptoms that anything is going haywire.
One way they explain it is that most of the patients they see fall into three “buckets.”
1) The cancer is gone. Great bucket. Everyone pull your pincers back and stay in this bucket if you can.
2) Cancer is aggressive. New spots popping up in a hurry, or in new places. Worst bucket. Cross your fingers you don’t end up here.
3) Cancer, but lazy. The cancer is not gone, but it also goes long periods where it’s not actively growing anywhere. Long periods is defined very loosely. It might be I get 6 months without needing any treatment. It might be years.
I, of course, am hoping it turns out I am in bucket 1, but if I am in bucket 3 that’s OK too.
I think I have mentioned this before, but holy shit does cancer require a ton of patience. At the beginning everything happens so fast that time seems to slow down, but then it’s just a lot of waiting. You wait for test results. You wait for scan results. You wait in rooms for waiting. You wait in exam rooms. You wait to heal. You wait to see how your body is going to react to drugs, to food, to drink, to movement. In between short waits there are long waits that are intermittently punctuated by moments of self-reflection where you think about what all of this means, if anything.
One side effect, for me, of all this waiting around, is I am not really scared anymore. It’s not like the wait at an amusement park line where you are going to be frightened out of your wits at the end. It’s more like the reverse of that. Trauma and anguish followed by a lot of boredom and some misery. Just like a backwards rollercoaster line, there are also a lot of shenanigans with friends to pass the time.
Anyway, I have the natural apprehension of wondering what results are going to be every 3 months, but I am not freaked out when I think about the possible paths I could be sent down by any given outcome. I’ll just do whatever comes next. Hopefully that’s more waiting, until those waits become 6 months, and then a year, and on and on. I am really good at killing time. Otherwise more medical adventures which will give me something to write about.
So that’s that. If you read this far you know as much as I do about what the hell my body is doing. There probably won’t be another post for a good long while. You’ll just have to wait.
And then a hero comes along