Long story leading to: Deb still healthy
Deb just had her regularly scheduled battery of tests. They gave us a
scare, but there doesn't seem to be anything to worry about.
The long story starts on Inauguration Day. Deb got a CAT scan at the
Beth Israel in Boston while I watched the festivities on the TV in the
waiting room. Like just about everyplace else, Beth Israel ground to a
halt for a few minutes while Obama and Justice Roberts stumbled over
the oath. People pushing brooms froze in their tracks, just like they
do at those world-stands-still moments in the movies.
There's usually about a week between the scan and the oncologist
appointment where we find out what it means. It's always a maddening
period, so we've learned to fill it with something distracting. This
time we lucked out, because Deb's sister Melissa was having a
destination wedding in Sedona. We were all packed up, so we went
straight from Beth Israel to the airport and caught a plane for Arizona.
Deb spent most of next several days shooting pictures.
Like this one:
We came back on Monday (the 26th) and had an appointment with Dr. Lange on Wednesday (yesterday).
Test results usually show up on the patient's web site at the same time
the doctor gets them, and over the years that has been a mixed
blessing. When the result is an unambiguous clean bill of health,
shortening the breath-holding period is wonderful. Anything else makes
the tension worse, so we go back and forth about whether and when we
want to see the reports. Deb looked at them Tuesday night while I was
at a meeting.
The radiologist's report on the CAT scan was much longer than usual,
and mentioned things (like a cyst on Deb's back) that have been there
all along, but nobody else has bothered to note. One of the newly-noted
things was along the wall of the colon. The radiologist offered three
interpretations: Maybe it was a recurrence of the GIST cancer; maybe it
was the kind of benign polyp people in their 50s often get; or maybe it
was a lump of ... the stuff you usually find in people's colons. He
recommended sticking a scope up there to see.
Rational people would look at this and say, "Probably nothing." But
we've been through this twice before, and it always starts with:
"Probably nothing, but you need another test." Back in 1996 it took
several rounds of probably-nothings before they said, "Yes, it's
something."
On the other hand, we have one of the best doctors in Boston, and over
the years we've learned to let him do the doctoring. So we decided to
try not to think too much about this until we heard what Lange had to
say the next day.
But that was going to be harder than we had expected. A major winter
storm was predicted for rush hour Wednesday morning, and just about
every school in Boston had already canceled classes. It usually takes
about an hour and a half to drive from Nashua to Beth Israel on a
weekday, but Boston traffic has choke points that can stop everything
cold for hours under the wrong conditions. When we first moved out here
from Chicago, we laughed at the way people panicked about predictions
of bad weather. Then one night it took me three hours to get home from
Cambridge -- and that was when we lived much closer to the city.
We decided we would drive the shorter distance to Lowell and take the
commuter train to the T. It would mean leaving at 8 for an 11 o'clock
appointment, but what else did we have to do? (Reasonable people might
have tried to reschedule for a day without a major storm, but that
option never came up.)
Having made our plan, we went to bed and pretended to sleep. I stopped
pretending at about 5 and got up to make coffee. We left at 8, as
planned, and arrived at Beth Israel with ten minutes to spare.
"Everything looks fine," Dr. Lange said. But what about the thing in
the colon, we asked. "Oh," he shrugged, "that guy must have had nothing
to do that afternoon. He wrote down every little thing." So what about
the extra test? "If you're due for one anyway, go ahead. But I wouldn't
do it because of this."
It turns out Deb is due, and the test will be done soon as part of a
regular check-up with her primary-care doctor. But we accept Lange's
conclusion that there's no special reason to worry about it. We went on
to have our usual doctor-patient chat about vacations and politics, and
discovered that he once stayed at the same Sedona hotel that we had
used on our 2004 trip. We agreed that investments were a sore subject,
and Lange commented that he hadn't really wanted to retire anyway.
Deb and I had a celebratory lunch at the Bertucci's in Longwood, then
retraced our steps home. On the train back to Lowell, I fell asleep.
Doug