Pesty McPesterton

I am a pest. Pesty McPesterton right here (by the way, when you blog, there is an unwritten rule that you get to make up words). I was going to have a psychological meltdown today. I was hanging on by a thread or two… I did good-ish. -sigh-

I left 3 messages for the oncology nurses and then started to wonder why the nurses hadn’t called me back. They usually call me back so quickly when I leave a message (with an ALL CLEAR YAY!), but now they weren’t calling me back. To me this usually meant I was waiting for a doctor or nurse practitioner to call me… they tend to take a little bit longer (and my oncologist is not in town). Gaahhhhhh. I managed to stay so calm all weekend and I was 99% sure my cough and chest pain would just magically go away now that I had been scanned because everything was going to be normal. I think I can add up how many days of my life have been spent waiting for scan results… too many.

So the good news is, I have two lungs, they are in my chest and they fill with air ALMOST all of the way. Apparently I have something called a pneumothorax which was described at “miniscule apical pnuemothorax” on my left lung which means it is collapsed a teensy bit at the bottom (I think, I am not a medical professional, I use Dr. Google). Which is usually caused by a traumatic injury and I guess this little guy wasn’t around in my old CT (they compared the CT to my PET CT from 2011). It sounds like this is an injury from radiation based on the labs (and location). It is “an unusual appearance and not definitely mass like” (because that is like, science!).  There is also some other indent or whatever that looks like radiation ouchies (I was warned they were going to get some of my lung and maybe some of my heart, now we see it I think…). Whether or not this is the cause of my chest pain and cough is yet to be officially determined since radiation was almost exactly 2 years ago. Happy Cancerversary to me on Thursday! 2 years from the last day of radiation.

I also have 5 teensy pulmonary nodules (all less than 5 mm). One next to the unhappy lung area noted above and four in lymph-node-like locations in my right lung. Cancer was on my left side, so they are mostly on my right…

The comparison did not show these nodules in my PET CT from years go, but the notes said that they could have been missed because they are so small and they weren’t looking as closely at my lungs, so who knows. They may have been there hanging out, maybe not, but they weren’t glowing back then I assume, since they were making me glow.

I am waiting to find out when I will have an appointment with a Pulmonologist at Huntsman who will decide if they can/will/want to biopsy and try and look at my “unusual” pnuemothorax. It sounds like they will at least CT again in 3 months (more things to monitor, yay). My oncologist gets back from traveling on Thursday and will also look everything over and we will see what she thinks we should do.

Luckily my Oncology NP sent me the actual lab reports because the report has me much calmer than the description sounded in my head non-physical-report (everyone loves an optimistic radiologist, as we know I have met the pessimistic ones, that just made me giggle… I think I am giddy from lack of sleep). Initial description essentially sent both Mike and I in a tailspin. I think we are calm-ish now.

So, I won’t lie, “nodules” was the word we really were trying to avoid on this report… but so far everything looks fairly optimistic. I want to go back to being pessimistic though, because I was being super optimistic my scan wouldn’t show any problems. This is why my pessimist and my optimist are always fighting..

Author: Mandi

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