I Am Localized.
Last week, I had three tests in three days. Bone scan, where they inject you with radioactive substances, wait three hours for them to permeate your being, then look at your bones for tumors-n-such.
Then bone marrow biopsy, where they lightly hammer big needles into your bones (don’t worry: they give you morphine first), and extract liquid marrow and solid bone, to look for tumors-n-such.
And finally a MUGA test (we kept calling it my Muggles test) to see if I had magical powers, and to check if my heart was strong enough to withstand one of the chemo drugs, which can damage the heart. Another one for which I get injected with radioactive substances.
Friday I let you know that my heart was strong, my bone scan clean, and last night I got word that the bone marrow biopsy was totally CLEAN. That means No Tumors Anywhere In My Body. I have been so used to expecting good news and getting bad news lately that I didn’t realize how much I was dreading these latest results—but I have broken pattern. The other shoe has fallen, as much as it’s going to fall, for now.
They are calling me LOCALIZED. That means that my organized cancer was in one place, and one place only—the opposite of metastatic. Of course, the sneaky thing about Ewing’s is that it ‘seeds’ into the blood, so, if I correspond to the bell curve, there’s an 85% percent chance there are still some seeds in my body, even though the lung tumor is gone. That’s why they do the grueling chemo, as insurance—it would be ethically wrong not to suggest it.
But the fact is, I may be cancer-free already. Sometimes I even feel cavalier and want to say to my oncologist, of whom I am growing terribly fond (is this Stockholm syndrome?), “Oh go ahead, do your little chemo, even though you and I both know that I am cancer-free. I’m tough. I can take it.”
The bad news: I do not have any magical powers. I am a Muggle after all. But after all those radioactive substances, really, one never knows…
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