Friday’s appointment at the bone marrow clinic marks the longest interval, at three months, that I have gone without seeing a doctor in the past seven years.  I have a disease, t-cell prolymphocytic leukemia, that has no known cure.  One of the world’s specialist on t-cell disorders has assured me that “it will come back”.  But somewhere around five years out, I started thinking about the future again as something longer than six months.  Somewhere around then I started to imagine various plans and schemes that would take several years.  Somewhere around then I started to dream again.

There was a time when one of my first thoughts upon awakening was “I have cancer.”  There was a time when I was reluctant to take out a magazine subscription because I was sure not that I would be alive to read an entire year’s worth.  But as I got further out from my second remission, and then from my peripheral blood stem cell transplant (pbsct), I began to relax a little and to ease back into some semblance of an ordinary life.  My mortality ceased to be a daily or even weekly focus of attention.

But the fact of having to return to the oncologist after a hiatus, this fact seems to provoke anxiety.  It happened after my first remission also.  The old worries and discomfort start to creep back into consciousness.  As I have described in several posts over the past four weeks, seemingly innocuous signs and symptoms started to acquire a foreboding.  The persistent sore throat, the large bruises on my thigh, those occasional days when I had no energy at all.  Signs of aging, of working to hard in the garden or … the vague signs of my leukemia gaining strength and making ready for a third attack on my life and limb.

Getting ready for the wedding shower we were hosting this weekend did occupy my mind.  But Friday afternoon I found myself in the exam room at St. Francis.  I sat calmly in the infusion chair, casually mentioning these vague symptoms and my concern to the nurse as she took my vitals.  She drew my blood and said we would know soon enough, when the results of my cbc were done.  The cbc is done right in the clinic, no waiting for results from the hospital lab.  So within five or ten minutes she should be returning with the white sheet of paper with my blood counts and differential graphed.  Except for one anxious time when my nurse got sidetracked, the sheet has always arrived back in those five to ten minutes.  I have always imagined that the day it does not come back, that will be the day I found out I have relapsed disease.  They will know that I will be able to interpret the blood tests because of its soaring white count and its low hemoglobin and platelet count.  Instead of bringing the sheet straight to me, the nurse will have shown it to the oncologist first.  And it will be him appearing at the exam room door, paper in hand, expression serious.

But Friday was not that day.  The nurse came back in five minutes as usual.  The doctor came in later.  We went through the systems check.  Everything normal.  We made plans for my next appointment – in three months – my five year transplant birthday.  Something of a milestone in itself.  So the miracle of my health continues.  And grace shines upon me.

cancer

One Response to “Bone Marrow Clinic Follow-up”

1. Rivka with a capital A says:

   May 20, 2009 at 1:07 pm

   Thanks for visiting my blog and for adding me to your blogroll.

   One thought I would like to share with you about this post: we choose how to live with cancer. we can live in fear, or we can believe in our own future.

   I choose to believe in and plan for my future.

   As I tell my husband: “wouldn’t it be a shame to live for the next twenty years worrying about dying tomorrow?”