So, I had a firm diagnosis of cancer on Thursday 23rd August.
I'd always imagined that would be a clear-cut thing, but I don't actually know what kind of cancer, or where.
quick wiggle effect of flashback
Call me James (a pseudonym). I'm in my mid-50s, a semi-retired English technical writer living with my wife Irene (also a pseudonym) in a south-coast English town. We've no children. I've previously been in good health – a little overweight but well in the green for BMI, a non-smoker, and I have very mild asthma, none of that stopping me being a keen weekend walker.
Shortly before Christmas, I had flu, involving a nasty cough. I got over the flu, but the cough stayed ... and stayed. My chest sounding thoroughly clear, my GP tried various possibilities - nasal spray, adjusting asthma preventer dose, Omeprazole (in case the cough was due to gastric reflux) - without much effect, so finally sent me for a chest X-ray.
Very quickly an appointment came, unexplained, for a CT scan (fancy X-ray). At that appointment – after I'd got over trying to decide what Total Recall joke I'd make after coming out of the scanner (e.g. “Euaaargh, you blew my cover!”) – I asked what it was about, and found the first x-ray had been annotated “? right paratracheal node”. A few days later we came home from a day out to find a series of answering machine messages from our GP's surgery, asking me to come in a.s.a.p.
The CT scan had shown a number of enlarged lymph nodes in my chest. My GP explained it was “worrying”, with a number of possible causes, so ordered a fast-track appointment with a thoracic consultant. This happened in less than a fortnight, and he said there was a "strong indication" that it was cancer. The actual statement was less scary than when he called in an overly kind patient liaison nurse, who gave us lots of leaflets with ominous phrases like "I am here to support you and those close to you throughout your illness". Irene and I both cried a bit.
The next step was a biopsy, a moderately unpleasant procedure called EBUS (Endobronchial Ultrasound Biopsy) where you're conscious but sedated, and they dangle a probe down into your lungs, locate the adjacent lymph nodes by ultrasound, then take samples with a little needle. There's no pain, but it involves a deal of coughing from the local anaesthetic sprays used.
After about ten days - very tense ones - the results came back, and we discussed it with one of the registrars. The lymph nodes showed both squamous and adenocarcinoma cells. I asked, "is this a definite diagnosis of cancer?", and the answer was "Yes."
wiggle effect as we come out of flashback
Though we feel less in limbo than when the cancer diagnosis was uncertain, we are still in limbo. The CT scan, apart from those lymph nodes, shows nothing, and my overall health and lung functions are fine. The central chest lymph nodes, apparently, pick up the garbage downstream from various places, such as lungs, thoat, neck, and head. So the next step is a PET scan, for which I have to go to a mobile unit in Taunton (the choices were that, Plymouth, Bournemouth or Poole) on Tuesday. That, hopefully, will find the primary tumour, as well as anywhere else it may have spread to.
