One late afternoon in April, through the walls of my little isolation chamber, I learned that the PET scan that will help stage my lymphoma would be delayed - there was something wrong with the scanner, and they would have to turn the whole thing off and on again. By this point, I was convinced they had forgotten me, as it had been more than an hour since I received my shot of radioactive tracers, but they eventually popped in to let me know the bad (there's something wrong) and good (but we've fixed it!) news.
I've never had trouble with claustrophobia, but having to lie dead still in what must have been a huge tube of whirring electromagnets is still a far cry from the cheery "just pretend you're catching some sun on a beach" suggested by the staff before they locked me in with the scanner.
A week later, I was finally staged - stage 2a, main right neck mass with dots on the left and a few on my chest. Again, my strategy of expecting the worse and hoping for the best paid off as I was convinced I was already stage 3. As the consultant mentioned, with Hodgkin's, the staging doesn't really affect the treatment received ('gold standard' AVBD), only the length of time it would last. But with these final pieces of information, it felt like I had officially joined the ranks and found my place amongst all the others who were battling their way through this disease.
With mum's plane tickets booked, and my last day of work agreed, all that was left to do was brace myself for the next six months.
