A CHANCE MEETING

A phone call from Sunnybrook this morning knocked me off my ‘early bird gets the worm’ perch.

“Sir, do you realize that you’re an hour late for your 9 o’clock appointment?” the caller declared in an authoritative tone.

“But no one called to say I had an appointment,” I stammered.

“Please get down here as quickly as possible and we’ll try to squeeze you in,” offered the voice in a more conciliatory note.

Forty-five minutes later, I checked in to see a Dr. Parker. I was whisked through the reception area and within ten minutes I was in an examining room with my ‘new’ doctor. I had wormed my way into the good doctor’s patient roster in record time clearly refuting the veracity of the early bird adage.

Dr. Parker examined the results of my PET scan and earlier CT scans and seemed genuinely puzzled. When she stepped out for a moment to get more charts, I snuck a peek at her notes. ‘Suspicious for residual disease’ she had penned.

When she returned a few minutes later, she began with some interesting news.

“I don’t think we can do radiation here.”

She explained. “Your initial tumours that covered a good part of your lower back have been eradicated. This newly discovered tumour, which may have been missed in the initial CT scans, resides in the tissue supporting your bowel. In my opinion, it is unrelated to the location and type of the large cell mass that was targeted by the chemotherapy.”

“But why does that mean you can’t you do radiation?” I asked.

“Two reasons actually,” she replied. “One, the tumour is less than 15 mm in length, too small for standard radiation procedures. Secondly, its location in the fold of the non-stationary bowel makes it a very difficult target.”

“Like picking a raspberry out of a tangle of cobwebs,” I ventured.

“Something like that,” Dr. Parker smiled. “I’m thinking that what you have is a low grade lymphoma that we’ll have to keep an eye on.”

“You mean it’s growing slowly like prostate cancer in an older man?” I added.

I think the doctor was getting tired of my analogies but she nodded in agreement.

“I can’t be perfectly certain here. I’m going to run this by some radiologists and see what they think. We’ll get back to your doctor in a few days with a more definitive assessment.”

I really wasn’t sure how to react to this development. On the one hand, I was sidestepping radiation which was great. On the other hand, it appeared that I wasn’t going to be totally in the clear of cancer for a long time. Was this all part of the plan?

It was then I received a grace filled answer to my ambivalence.

Just as I was about to leave Sunnybrook, a radiant looking mature woman in a wheelchair approached me with a warm smile and called my name. Although I probably hadn’t seen her in fifteen years, I recognized Mrs. S immediately and extended a hand in greeting. Mrs. S is the mother of Brad, one of my former students and a real math wiz, who now works at SMART Board. She explained that her husband was just beginning his treatment for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

“What a coincidence,” I thought to myself.

I expressed my concern for her husband and offered that I was writing a blog about my lymphoma that might be of some help. She gave me her son’s e-mail so I could touch base with him about it. I do hope that in some small way my posts can be of some help to Brad’s family.

Since that chance meeting, my concern about my small tumour has all but disappeared.