What I Said Then:

That first Monday night was a long night.

We laughed, we cried, we started working through the 5 (or 7 depending on who you ask) stages of grief. But most of the time we just sat there looking at each other as we each individually cycled through the following at different rates: “I can’t believe this is happening,” “Why is this happening,” “Maybe he’s wrong,” “This is unreal,” and my personal favorite, I would occasionally just go with a good “WHAT?!?”

As is often the case with these things, I awoke the next morning with a deep sigh. It was real. This was Day 2.

Our health insurance and medical provider are through Christine’s employer. By 9 o’clock in the morning on Tuesday the 14th (Day 2) we already had received several phone calls from them and our calendar was quickly filling up with tests and appointments.

By mid-day we found ourselves at the clinic checking-in for a CT (or CAT) scan. If this this whole thing wasn’t surreal enough already it was starting to feel completely unreal.

We were asked to arrive about an hour and a half prior to the scheduled scan time because I had to drink the contrast solution that would allow the scanning equipment to see my bowels. They brought out what I can only describe as two Iced, Venti, Watered-Down, Runny, Cheap, Pina Colda Mixes which I was to drink over the course of an hour or so. Not surprisingly it was pretty terrible.

Once I choked down the “fizzy lifting drink” (it wasn’t fizzy, but that’s what I took to calling it for some reason) we were taken back into the exam room where I changed into some robes and was given what was to be the first of many IV’s that I’ve had in the past two weeks.

I don’t look so amused in this picture, because honestly I wasn’t. But as we learned while I was puking off the side of the boat earlier this summer, in hindsight, I will always wish later that we had taken the picture.

The scan itself was pretty quick and simple. They took a couple of quick passes with the just the drink contrast and then they injected some contrast into my veins through the IV and took some more images. There was the possibility of some weird side effects to the intravenous contrast but I didn’t really experience any of them. The technician explained that there was a strong chance that I might feel like I was urinating when the contrast entered my system, but he assured me that I wouldn’t actually be peeing myself. Fortunately all I got was a slightly bad taste in my mouth.

When I got back to the exam room after the procedure I broke down a little. For the first time I just felt really scared about what was to come. It was all starting to sink in. Here I was at the hospital (WHAT?!?) undergoing the first of many medical procedures when less than 24 hours ago I was fine and far as I knew healthy. But now, I was all of a sudden acutely aware of what the next few months of my life were going to be like. And for a moment it overwhelmed me.

I don’t think that poor technician was really prepared to see someone cry after a CT Scan.

At home that night we got a call from the doctor that I had seen the day before. He just wanted to check-in on us and let us know that, while he wasn’t a radiologist, he’d seen the CT Scan results and that it was exactly what he would have expected to see with lymphoma. Additionally my blood work had come back from the day before, and that it too was consistent with lymphoma. At that point, even we had to admit that this was happening.

The only other hope that we had was also gone by this point. Before leaving the clinic the night before (and after the blood draw) I had been given a tuberculosis test. The doctor thought there was a small chance that my cough and other symptoms could have been caused by TB but he was giving me the test just to rule it out as a matter of due diligence. The TB test is given by injecting a small (and benign) amount of the disease under the skin on the arm. If it turns into a red bump within 2 days then you either have, or have had, tuberculosis.

(An aside for us young kids:  This test is apparently something that our parents know all too well. When I began telling this part of the story to my parents they both instinctively rolled up their sleeves to start showing me their own TB Test scars on their upper arms. Apparently it was a mandatory test back in the day and it left a much bigger and more permanent mark than it does today.)

So, about 24 hours after the initial diagnosis based on a chest x-ray and a list of symptoms, we suddenly and definitively had the x-ray, the CT scan, and the blood work, and my list of symptoms so we could no longer deny this was actually happening.

It kind of sucked.

But, what was hard to see at the time was that we had already worked our our way through quite a  few of the early stages of grief, and we were well on our way to acceptance.

What I Say Now:

Updated 1 Year Later – September 30, 2011

I would write about this moment in later posts, but I remember what really set me off during my little emotional breakdown in the exam/changing room was the simple thought that one day this WOULD become routine. I was now a patient. And as scared as I was to be going through this, eventually one day soon I would reach the point where I wasn’t scared anymore. That I would be comfortable in a hospital setting, that I would become a regular. That meant something to me, that I would eventually become a “patient.”

As I suspected and feared, tests at the hospital did quickly become routine. But that first one was terrifying. It was the morning after I first went to the doctor, and there I was, IV in my arm, about to have my first procedural test. I would be back, again and again for this and other tests over the first few weeks, and at some point it would become routine.

I when I did become an old veteran, it wasn’t so bad. I was continually impressed with the people (nurses, doctors, technicians) that I met throughout my treatment. Many of them do the same thing, over and over again all day long, but yet I really got the sense from most of them that there wasn’t anything routine about their jobs at all. The patient becomes the X Factor. Each of us is different and the people that I met always seemed to do a good job of tailoring their care to the patient. Helping to put the patient at ease when the situation calls for it, or rolling with their outgoing nature when it’s clear that this isn’t their first rodeo.

Overall, I got there pretty quick, like by the end of second week.

Still, it doesn’t discount the shock of those early days. It was pretty intimidating. I remember that at many of these early appointments (like the later surgical consultation, and my first time meeting with my oncologist) I couldn’t get my resting heart-rate below 114. I could put out a calm and collected persona, but inside my mind and body were racing.