Well, Happy F&$@’en Birthday To Me

This week has been all about good news. It all started on Monday when MA saw her Orthopedic surgeon. It had been a little more than two weeks since her accident and surgery. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend this appointment but the overall outcome was that her stitches were removed and she was given the blessing to drive. She did not wait long to test out her skills. She came home from her appt around 5:30 and by 6:30 she was driving Cassy to her practice.

Today, Wednesday, a.k.a. my birthday, I had my appointment with my oncologist, my best bud. As always, he was running late. I think it took about 1h before we saw him. When he finally showed up, he was in a good mood. It could be that he was going on holidays tomorrow but I like to think it was because he was happy to see me. We went through the typical pleasantries and then got down to business. Before getting too deep though, I mentioned that it was my birthday today. My doctor literally leaped off his chair and his big mitt came out at me and he starts to wish me a happy birthday. In doing so, we both inadvertently hit MA’s broken foot that was resting on a stool between us. Had it been a few weeks ago, she would have screamed like a banshee. Instead, I did not even realize I hit her until we were driving home.

Afterwards, he continued to review my results of some of the tests that were performed since my last visit with him. In doing this review, one result jumped out at him. He asked me what stage he said I had before. I said stage IV and he said that he made a mistake. As he did not have the results of the PET scan, he did not have all the information to give an accurate diagnosis. With this new set of results, it showed that the lesions on the liver are not cancerous. They are benign hemangiomas.  As such, my new diagnosis is Stage IIa. Much better than Stage IV.

I did not get into details with him on what the “a” means but I did a simple search online and here is what I got:

A vs. B

Each stage may also be assigned an A or B. The letter B is added (stage IIIB, for example) if a person has any of the B symptoms listed below:

• Loss of more than 10% of body weight over the previous 6 months (without dieting)
• Unexplained fever of at least 101.5°F
• Drenching night sweats

I do not have these symptoms so I have “a” and not “b”. This is great news and a great birthday present. We tried to get all our questions asked but he did not have the time as he had many other patients to see. We did get a chance to meet his assistant, Nurse Shelly. During the previous two visits, she was not in so this was the first time we met her. When the doctor first talked about her, he introduced her as his right hand (wo)man. As such, we were anxious to meet her. She sat down and we asked her some of our questions and then she gave us a tour of the cancer centre. It was nice to finally meet her in person.

Later in the evening, my brother called to wish me a happy birthday. He too had a visit with his oncologist today. He is still in full remission and his results look great. The interesting part is that he talked to his doctor about me and my doctor. It turns out that his doctor taught my doctor back in the day. There could even be a chance that my doctor spent some time with Marc during one of his many visits when he was first diagnosed. I will need to bring this up when I see my doctor next time.

That is all for now. There is still a lot going on the rest of this week with Gen in Montreal for the rest of the week with two different events. More to come on this in a later post. Tata for now.