Worried, but grateful

Yesterday Gregg came home from work, sat down heavily in a chair beside me, and said, "I got a call from Jamie Smith this morning. From him, not his office."

Jamie Smith is Dr. Jamie Smith, his oncologist. My heart sank.

Gregg's been having yearly chest CT scans since 2012, when he was treated for stage 3 lung cancer. One such scan was a couple of weeks ago. Apparently there have been some small but measurable changes in his chest area since the last one, and out of an abundance of caution Dr. Smith is sending him to have a PET scan next week. For those of you lucky enough to not know, PET scans are used to detect cancer. There's a small possibility that there's been a recurrence. 

Dr. Smith said (more than once) that he thinks there's less than a 10% chance that the cancer is back, but since Gregg only has one lung (they removed his left lung to save his life), there's just no room to take a "wait and see" approach. Catching any recurrence in the very earliest stages will be crucial to treating it successfully. He told Gregg to do his best not to worry over the next few days (easier said than done, of course, which he readily admitted) because he really thinks it will prove to be nothing. 

But oh, it's scary. It's hard not to worry. 

At the same time, I'm so incredibly grateful to Dr. Smith. He's been watching out for my husband for years now, and I have faith in him. He's not only a good oncologist, but he's also kind and thoughtful. He says he'll have answers for us within a day or two of the PET scan, which is next Tuesday. You can't ask for any better than that. 

But it's going to be a long week. 

Milestone

Thank you all for your kind comments on my post yesterday. I appreciate all of your well wishes and support more than you know. I wish I had known you all back when my husband got sick. I was blogging then, but had very few followers and had yet to meet most (all?) of you in late 2011/early 2012. It would have been a wonderful source of support during the darkest time of my life. At times I felt very, very alone in those days.

I didn't want to mention this yesterday until Gregg got the "all clear"....but it was exactly 5 years ago that he got his cancer diagnosis. That means he's passed what I consider a very important milestone, and one I secretly feared he would never see. The 5-year survival rate for stage 3B lung cancer is a dismal 5%. I found that statistic early on and nearly despaired. My husband is a lucky, lucky man. Lucky to have as a long-time personal friend the head pulmonary specialist at McLeod hospital here in Florence, who pulled out all the stops to get the cancer treated quickly and aggressively by the best doctors, surgeons, and oncologists in the area. Lucky that he was relatively young and in good health (except for the giant tumor in his left lung, of course) and could stand an aggressive course of treatment. Lucky to have good health care insurance that paved the way for any and all tests and treatments to be done immediately. He may have lost an entire lung, and chemotherapy was hell, but he's here today and healthy. Nothing could be luckier than that!

I expected yesterday to feel momentous, but it was strangely anticlimactic. The oncologist didn't even mention the 5 year thing. Gregg will still be on a 6 month follow up schedule, at least for now, because they made an appointment for next June. After seeing the doctor yesterday, he went back to work and it was just a regular day. When I mentioned the milestone to him last night, he kind of shrugged it off and changed the subject. It didn't feel all that momentous to him.

But to me, it feels like a miracle.

Depression

Easter was a melancholy day here despite nice weather and a day off work. Gregg has been dealing with some depression and anxiety, which is common in people who have finished cancer treatment. Depression is also a relatively common side effect of a drug he still has to take, a nerve pain blocker. The oncologist wants him to continue taking it for awhile yet, as he still has pain and odd sensations (peripheral neuropathy) in his surgery site a full year after finishing treatment. Chemotherapy is rough. Especially when it's administered six weeks after a lung has been removed!

I thought, when all the treatments were over and Gregg got a clean bill of health, that life would go right back to normal. How wrong I was! I had no idea what an emotional roller coaster we were still in for. The fear of the cancer coming back that we both live with is the worst part. And although every three month follow up with the oncologist so far has resulted in a glowing bill of health, the appointments are constant reminders that all it will take is for one small shadow to show up on a scan, or for one of the blood tests to come back with an abnormal result, and we'd be plunged right back into the nightmare that last year was.

Knowing how grim lung cancer normally is doesn't help, either. A man that went to church with my mom was diagnosed about two weeks after Gregg--and he died last month. When she told me about that, it was like getting stabbed in the heart. Of course, I know that the statistics for lung cancer are downright dismal compared to other forms. The pulmonary specialist  (a close personal friend of ours that we are lucky to have) has assured us that Gregg is doing wonderfully well, and if he continues to have great checkups for another year or two that he will likely be considered cured. His current good health is almost miraculous, and I'm grateful beyond words for it, but one's sense of confidence about the future can never be fully restored after the kind of ordeal we've been through. The best you can do is take things one day at a time and learn to get on with your life despite the ever-present nagging fear. But there are days and weeks when that's easier said than done, and this week has been one of the rough ones.