I'm healthy ... and I'm kind of displeased about it. Strange, right? It's not that I want to go another round with cancer, but I feel very ill at ease. The recent bloodwork shows that-among all of the other numbers-there is actually a decrease in my tumor marker. This is good news; it's just not as good as I thought.
I was under the misconception that the tumor marker was a definitive test. I thought that it was sort of like a cancer screen. You know, if the number doesn't spike, then you're healthy. Just to confirm this theory, I asked my oncologist as he was breezing out the door:
ME: "So, what we're looking for as a red flag is the tumor marker, right?"
HIM: "Well, not exactly. Your tumor marker is at 18, which is great. But, it could be 4 and you could have cancer. Usually, it spikes when there is a recurrence, but not always."
ME: "Then, how do we know that I'm healthy?"
HIM: "It's a combination of your symptoms, your blood work and your scans. There is no blood test that will tell us for sure, but the CA 27-29 is the closest that we have."
ME: "Okay. When do I have another PET scan?"
HIM: "We will do another one in a year. Seventy percent of people who develop cancer again do so within the first two years. You're almost to one year, so you can feel happy about that."
ME: Disappointed and sad ... which is the opposite of happy.
If there were something wrong, we could act on it. We could put together a plan and fight. But there isn't anything wrong ... that we have found. As you may recall, it took six months to diagnose the cancer the first time, and then there was uncertainty about the margins after the surgery.
So, I'm not super hip on waiting and hoping. I don't like hoping. I'm an analytical, left-brained person. I like knowing. And what I would like to know is that I can breathe a sigh of relief. I would like to be able to do some sort of procedure that would produce concrete, irrefutable evidence that there is no cancer in this body ... and I would like to do that test every week.
