jenny's belly

Work tomorrow

I met with my oncologist yesterday. We had a misunderstanding- I thought I was getting my "return to work" letter from him, and he didn't know he was giving it to me yet. So its in the mail. I'm to return to work tomorrow without a return to work release from my doctor! I have a meeting with my (new) boss but I don't expect they'll let me do much as H.R. would have a fit.

Anyway, the news from my oncologist was otherwise good. He was able to see the results of my endoscopy and colonoscopy and everything came out great. No problems, just some irritations in my stomach (inflammation) which doesn't surprise me at all. I still wake up at night feeling like I'm choking, when really its trapped gas. There are weird things going on down there.

My gastroenterologist called me today and repeated what my oncologist said, and added--get this-- I do NOT have Celiac's disease! It turns out the kind of test they did last year gives false positives and with the cancer diagnosis they weren't in any rush to do additional testing. It would have been nice if for no other reason than I could have eaten normal food while in the hospital. I had to eat rice crackers, which are soft as concrete, and the last thing you should serve someone recovering from stomach and esophageal surgery. Why don't you just punch me in the gut while you're at it?

Anyway, I'm on the computer now (at 10:20pm) to find out the train schedule for getting into the city tomorrow. It has been a long, long time since I have been on the train! I plan to go in for 9:00 but don't expect I'll be in there much past noon. I was going to try to stay a whole day but I went back to sleep today at 11:00am and woke up at 3pm. And I'm sleeping really well at night too, its not like I'm up at 3:00am wandering around. But it's only 5 months since radiation stopped, and 3 months since chemotherapy stopped, so fatigue and chemobrain are not crazy-out-of-the-question symptoms right now.

I have my next CT scan scheduled for late July, and should be able to have my port-a-cath taken out sometime afterwards. Probably late September.

So the real news is that the cancer is gone, which I'm starting to maybe believe. I still worry about the rogue lymph node (Fabian) but not as much. I just find it extremely hard to believe things are well and truly behind me. You know what I mean?

posted by Jen at 10:16 PM