(If you got that 80’s movie reference, you are my people. 🤪)

So. It’s been a minute. Let’s talk about unremarkable. This is the term that radiologists use when they have no finding to report on a CT scan. Unremarkable. Its absolutely insane to think that anyone who has been through cancer should be lumped into the same category as any old Joe off the street who goes in for a CT for something completely mundane (likely not mundane to the person undergoing the CT scan, but for all intents and purposes, ALL scans that do not have to do with cancer are, in my mind, mundane) and their scan indicates no problems found. “Unremarkable” is the term used when everything looks normal. As in, there is no remark to be made, all is as it should be. Unremarkable.

My husband had his last CT scan on April 6th, that was about 2 months ago. This scan was meant to confirm what we all hoped to be true, that there was no evidence of disease. Now — if you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time, you’ll recall that I have quite a distrust of these scans. I really HATE that we’re in this position. Stuck with a cancer in which there really are no good diagnostic tools to detect, but here we are and, for better or worse, we have CT scans. And the scan didn’t exactly give me faith in the process. Instead of unremarkable, we got this:

There are subtle areas of non-masslike decreased enhancement involving the cortex of the lower pole of the right kidney. In addition there is mild diffuse thickening of bladder wall.

That doesn’t exactly sound like good news, does it? While our oncologist strongly pointed out to us that she “doesn’t think” its a recurrence, welllllll I’m not so sure. This word thickening is frequently used to describe how this cancer is found and it brings me no peace to see it used here … even if our oncologist thinks its not cancer. I wish I could do something! I wish we could send this to our specialist team at MSK, but my husbands insurance changed on Jan 1 and they are no longer in our network! So we’re stuck just taking the oncologists word for it.

To be clear, I pushed and pushed for my husband to reach back out to MD Anderson in Houston to see if they would be willing to take a look at the scans. (They ARE in my husbands new insurance network.) Since we had already met with the oncologist there too, I think we might have an in and at least get a specialist team to look at them to ease my mind a little bit. But, ultimately, this is not up to me. My husband has to be the one to push for this to happen. I can want him to do it all I want, but at the end of the day, I cannot make the calls for him, they won’t talk to me because of HIPAA privacy laws. So I’m stuck depending on my husband to take care of it — and he won’t. So I’ve sort of had to let it go.

So I did.

And things have been GLORIOUS! After chemo was over and we were through the thick of if, the air lifted and everything became calm … well, as calm as you could get in the middle of a pandemic. But it has been so wonderful not having to worry about chemo or cancer or any of that for these past few months! Apart from the port in my husbands chest and his more lean physique, (can’t say I’m super mad about that, lol hubba hubba) we have very little physical evidence left of this cancer journey.

So about that port, he attempted to get it removed a couple weeks after his last chemo treatment, but they had stopped allowing elective procedures so he couldn’t. They finally called him back last week and he made an appt to get the port taken out on Monday.

I thought I would be happy about this. This whole time, we’ve both hated that thing, this constant reminder of cancer, this foreign alien body sticking out of his chest. When we cuddle, I tend to lay on that side and this hard rock, for lack of better analogy, just pokes me and I want it gone. But that little voice in the back of my head keeps hearing that word thickening and my mind immediately goes to recurrence. If he has a recurrence, the next step will be a different chemo regimen. We’ll be back on the awful chemo boat and he’ll have to get the port put back in. Another surgery, more time spent looking at my husband passed out in a hospital bed. I think at this point, I question whether he should get it out or not. His next scan is in about a month, on July 9th. At that point, we’ll have the 2 scans to compare and I think we’ll know for sure whether there is any type of recurrence or whether our oncologist was correct, and there really wasn’t cancer on the April 6th scan. IDK. Maybe I’ll have a convo about it with my husband, he’s not usually open to these types of conversations, he wants me to be nothing but positive and he really doesn’t want to hear anything else except blatant positivity … but the closer I get to getting this out, the more apprehensive I am.

In other news, I FINALLY got my daughters senior pictures taken! We took them last night and I am BEYOND excited to see them! We rescheduled 5 times and yesterday was such a special day for us!! She got her makeup professionally done, we went shopping last weekend for some outfits, we got to spend some really amazing quality time together and I do believe that as she begins her college career, our relationship is starting to mend itself a bit. This makes my heart so incredibly happy! Here are some shots I snapped from my phone, not the best angles, but I just ADORE them already!

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So I guess the moral of this story is — I’m still desperately waiting for a scan that proclaims UNREMARKABLE! I have faith that it will happen, I just don’t know when that will be. Fingers crossed that its with this next scan!