Head Case

I had another brain MRI this morning and it looked good. I had written in my calendar that my appointment was at 9:00am, and I know you're supposed to be there 30 minutes early to get the port accessed and just be on hand, so Mom and I arrived at the hospital at 8:30. And then waited until 9:30, because I had actually written down the time I was supposed to be there, not the appointment time. Now, why they give you an appointment time, then ask you to be there 30 minutes early, is beyond me. The appointment time actually is 30 minutes earlier, else why require people to be there then? Anyway, Mom had brought along Julia Child's first French cookery book, so we had plenty to entertain ourselves with until I was called back. Somehow, I did manage to doze off multiple times during the actual noisy, noisy scan—I was very sleepy, probably because I actually had to get up with an alarm this morning, which is something I'm not accustomed to at all. I didn't sleep well, though, during the test. Occasionally the noises of the changing scans woke me, but more often it was just my own self snoring.

After the scan we (and Ian, who bicycled over from work) met with Dr Jason, and here is more or less what he said: The lesions are pretty much all looking better, some of them much better. The most worrisome one at the beginning of the summer, the one near my spinal cord, the one that was actually pressing into my spinal cord, has clearly shrunk quite a bit. There is now no visible pressing going on anywhere near the spinal cord. Also, since things have been continuing to respond to the treatments I've already had/am having, there are currently no plans to change anything. That is—no current plans for either gamma knife or traditional surgery. It's possible that my brain lesions will stop shrinking, or may even start to grow again, or that new ones will appear, in which case we will discuss different treatment options. It's also possible that they'll continue to shrink, perhaps even into non-existence (I vote for option number 2). I'll have another scan in about 2 months to see what we see.

In the meantime, tomorrow afternoon I meet with Dr. Specht again. I haven't had any scans with her in quite a while. I guess I had a chest CT in the hospital, or maybe right after I got out . . . yeah, I think right after I got out . . . but I did have a big blood draw again on Monday, so I'll probably have new tumor marker numbers. And besides that, we'll probably talk about taking the oxygen out of our house for good, and how I've been feeling much more energetic lately than I was last spring. But more specifics on this tomorrow.