Everyone Can Take A Breath

My friend Hallie reads this blog every day. She's reading right now, I bet. But ever since my first post, she's been complaining that she doesn't care about comics and just wants to hear about my condition. So here you go.

(The other 3 people reading this blog are okay with the comic talk, so hopefully they'll forgive the digression.)

As I've said before, my docs claim that the form of thyroid cancer I have is the bee's knees of all cancers. If you have to have any, that's the one you want. It is very treatable and tends to do little harm elsewhere in the body. So, point me. Yay.

But if you tilt that glass and empty it out halfway, you learn that in the off chance this cancer does spread, which is rare, it generally spreads to the lungs or bones. Lung cancer and bone cancer are no friends of mine. I'll keep my giant neck scar and gravelly voice, if you keep your slow drowning death or amputated limbs, thank you very much.

So you can imagine I was a little thrown off and nervous when my shiny, happy healthcare professionals suggested I get a CAT scan of my lungs, seemingly out of the blue. We had already mapped out my next steps for treatment--a radiation pill that will work it's way through me over a few days and a full-body scan after that to see if it managed to kill any lingering remnants of cancer in my neck or anyplace else it may have been. But this sudden call for a chest scan...WTF? What changed? What weren't they telling me?

To add to my worry, I have a bit of a chest cold or allergy thing going on this week that, coupled with the paranoia brought on by the pending chest scan, had me convinced my lungs were filled with tiny tumors and I was already doomed. After all, it was me--not any doctor--who found the swollen gland on my throat that kicked this mess off in the first place. Why should I expect them to be anything but surprised by the discovery that the cancer was bigger than just a thyroid thing.

But now we can all take a breath, because I had the scan and, according to the preliminary review, there's nothing to worry about with my lungs. The results were what I like to call a "positive negative"--negative for cancer, which is a positive. This isn't to say I'm cancer free or that the radiation isn't still necessary or even that, after the radiation, I will be 100% in the clear. It just means my condition hasn't escalated into something more than we already knew about.

We're back to the cuddly kitten of cancers, already chopped out of me, and a dose of nuclear medicine to napalm whatever's left.

And with that little bit of good news, here's a video that put's to rest who the superior archer is in comics...

...via pro wrestling, not archery.