Immunopatient by Peter Rooney

Author:Peter Rooney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hatherleigh Press
Published: 2017-10-16T09:15:18+00:00

Part II

Finding the Path

12

When the News Isn’t Good

On the drive into Boston, I could tell that Katharina was as nervous as I was. It was just a year after my initial diagnosis, and a break in the usual routine had us both on edge. For the first time since all this began, there’d been no news from my most recent CT session. And no one in my situation put much stock in the adage “No news is good news.”

I’d had bone scans and CT scans twice in the past year. It had become something of a routine: driving to Dana-Farber, parking the car, and heading to the original Dana-Farber building’s basement, where most of the imaging took place. On our way there, we’d walk past the pediatric cancer wing and catch glimpses of children surrounded by family members with love and worry evident in their eyes. Empathy would flood my brain whenever I saw them as my focus switched from myself to others. I would realize all over again how cancer ravages indiscriminately.

The radiology waiting room only reinforced that sense of randomness. Patients looked like card players in some cosmic casino, playing hands that varied greatly. Plenty of people looked perfectly healthy, but there were always a few in rough shape, gray faces sucking oxygen through tubes, careworn eyes looking at the floor.

Everyone was waiting for some sort of imaging, be it CT, PET, MRI, bone, or x-ray. All the tests were scheduled, conducted, and evaluated here by a talented team that had their craft down cold.

Each time I showed up for a scan, I made sure to inform the staff members that I was missing a kidney and nursing a sore shoulder with a titanium rod hammered through my humerus. That way they knew to check my creatinine levels and adjust their contrast dye dosage accordingly. Contrast dye is known to be hard on the kidneys, but without it, the tumors would not pop out to the radiologists viewing the images.

The radiation these tests exposed me to was also a concern; I’ve had CT scans every three months for the last five years, and the cumulative effect of so much radiation carries its own health risks. But when you have Stage IV cancer, you learn that there are a lot of these types of trade-offs, where the side effects of treatment can be so bad that it would be perfectly reasonable to forego them altogether, in favor of a higher quality of life. (I’m not judgmental about people’s treatment decisions, and I hope they respect my treatment decisions, as well. We’re all in this together, after all, and no one gets out of here alive anyway.)

In terms of risks vs. benefits, CT scans can catch tumors when they’re still small, at the point where treatment can be most effective. But despite their excellent imaging detail, a chest CT scan also delivers about seventy times more radiation than one chest x-ray, according to the American College of Radiology. There’s even

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