the tedium of amorphous anxiety

Vicissitudes of the last few weeks (for those who wish to experience vicariously, in shorthand, the tedium of amorphous anxiety):

For several weeks Val has had, off and on, some inexplicable waves of odd fatigue.  Sinus infection?  Allergies?  Hormonal shifts as her body continues to rebound from last year’s chemo?  Scary cancer-related phenomenon? Fear of scary cancer-related phenomenon, inducing anxiety and weird fatigue?  None of the above?

Anxiety.  Fretting.

She ran it by the oncologist, who double-checked Val’s bloodwork (good) and basically shrugged.  As Val didn’t present any obvious signs of sinus infection, Dr. T was disinclined to prescribe antibiotics.  (I pointed out that I myself used to get sinus infections every year, and never had the normal symptoms, but this argument didn’t move the oncologist either.)

Limbo.  Fretting.  Waves of fatigue coming and going.  Anxiety.  Several weeks of this.

I can’t remember anymore how Val ended up seeing the ear, nose and throat doctor again – I think she just made herself an appointment – but he said her sinuses were a mess and prescribed antibiotics.

Relief.  Hope that a cause (sinus infection) had been pinpointed.

Several days later: continued weird fatigue.  Resumed anxiety.  The eternal tightrope walk between insistent self-advocacy and paranoia.

Later still: discovered she’d been taking the antibiotics incorrectly.  Started taking them the right way.

And a few days later, started feeling better.  Hooray!

But then a few days after that, fatigue returned.  Crap.  Now what.  Started second round of antibiotics.

Asked oncologist for a CT scan.  Oncologist bumped up the one scheduled for next month.  Got scan on a Tuesday (9/8), after the Avastin infusion.  Results to be reported in 24 hours.

Wednesday passed.  Thursday passed.

Friday (9/11) 6:30 a.m. Val (camping outside Tahoe) got a call from the advice nurse, reading from the radiologist’s report.  The scan showed the last tumor still stable.  But also there was some vague tiny smudge of gray they couldn’t account for.  Scar tissue?  New metastasis?  No way to tell.  Val was advised not to worry about it, it was probably nothing, they’d check again in three months.

The rest of the weekend was not so relaxing.

Val left a message asking to speak with the oncologist.  Monday or Tuesday: another advice nurse called to say she’d spoken with the oncologist, and Dr. T thought the radiologist’s read of the scan was hooey.  Not to worry; the gray smudge was probably just pleural thickening.

Huge sighs of relief.  Maybe the next three months (until the next scan) can offer more hope than fear.

Thursday (9/17): finally the oncologist calls back.  It turns out her assessment is a bit more cautious.  The gray smudge on Val’s scan could be lots of things: scar tissue, pleural thickening, a weird blip.  Or, it could be new metastasis.  She’d be thoroughly unconcerned, she explains, if it weren’t for Val’s inexplicable bouts of fatigue.

Terrific.

But the smudge is tiny, too small to biopsy even.  And Dr. T will keep a close eye on it, and she assured Val that waiting three months for the next scan is doing exactly that.  And she said that since Val had such a tremendous response last year to chemo, it can be expected that she will respond beautifully again, should chemo ever again become necessary.  Which she is hoping it never will.

So are we.

Meanwhile, they will do an adrenal test tomorrow, to see if maybe that can account for Val’s fatigue.

So that’s where we are.  The small stabbing uncertainties are grinding.  Hope wavers and flares.  We pick tomatoes and chard and eat them.  Every day is a new dance.