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