I’ve avoided saying this out loud (and this is typing it, so it doesn’t count) and even now I don’t know if I’m going to finish this thought, or even post it if I do, but: I have this recurring fantasy/daydream that when we meet with the oncologist on Thursday, and we see the results of  last week’s CT Scan, that she’ll tell us that we can start counting down til my last chemo treatment… That the tumors are gone, and that I’ll be done in April.

This is really the first time that I’ve allowed myself to get excited, or to think about the possibility of being done with treatment. Up until this point, I’ve really REALLY tried not to think about it too much, choosing instead to not get my hopes up and to just take each treatment as it comes without thinking about where I am in the overall scheduled course of treatment. Any time I used to think about crunching those numbers I would always stop myself. “What if I’m only a quarter of the way there? Or, at best, halfway,” I’d think to myself. And to be honest its one of the most depressing thoughts that I’ve allowed myself to have. If I’m only halfway, that means that I basically have to again go through everything that I’ve already been though. That thought alone has been enough to stop me from thinking about it.

That is until now.

This week I allowed myself to count it out on my fingers. “October to November. November to December …”

As we creep into February we are now moving towards what could be the shorter end of the  “6-8 months of chemo” that I was told to expect. And now that I know this,  I can’t help but start thinking about the end.

I think about it now. I think about it A LOT.

I think about how good it will feel to be done. I think about the things that I might be able to do again as early as the spring. And I think about a time, possibly in the near future, when I can say that I HAD cancer.

I’m cautioned by a line that Morgan Freeman’s character Red says in The Shawshank Redemption: “Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.”

Possibly more accurate in this case is that hope can lead to disappointment.

See, there is a reason that I’ve started thinking about this. In my mind there is a chance that these CT Scan results will be good enough that and that the tumors will have shrunk back enough that we we’ll start talking about an exit strategy. What we want is a CT Scan that show no sign of disease and at that point the doctor will order my final two rounds of chemo (a total of another 4 treatments) and I’ll be done, six and half months after I started. I promised myself that I wouldn’t start thinking like this, but I’m just so ready to be done that I can’t help myself.

Now that I’ve started counting, I can’t stop. The downside to this is that I now know how long it possibly could be. If I don’t hear what I want to hear this week then it will likely be another 2 months until my next CT Scan, and assuming THAT test shows us what we want to see I’ll still have to go through that final 2 months of treatments, so that brings the next window for my final treatment in 4 months. At that point I’ll have been undergoing chemo treatments for almost 10 months. If that’s the case, it would mean that I’m only halfway…

I don’t know, maybe in the end Red was wrong and Andy Dufresne was right:  “Remember, Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies.”

I look back at the pictures from my first scans and in my mind the tumors look like they are at least half as big in December as they were in October. So wouldn’t that indicate that there is a good chance that now, another two months later, they are gone?

I hope so.