CHAPTER 4: THE SCANS, plus a little torture

A CT scan is no big deal.  You put on a robe, lay down on a table, a big machine spins around you, and you’re done.  If Doc orders a CT scan “with contrast,” then the party begins and you get it started with a HUGE barium milkshake and a needle in your arm.  As they send the “contrast material” through your veins they will tell you that you might taste something metallic in your mouth, you might feel a hot flash all over your body, and you will feel as if you are peeing yourself, but this is all normal.  And that’s just what you will be thinking: “Yes, this is all perfectly normal.”

 

Then head on over to the Cancer Center for your Breast MRI.  (Did I mention I did this on a Friday night?  Do I know how to party or what?).  Another needle in the arm and they leave it there.  Try not to look at it, try not to touch it, just ignore it and maybe it will get bored and go away on its own.  Soon I’ll be lying flat on a scanner table with my boobs in boob holes and my head in a head rest looking down into oblivion.  The technician comes in:

“Jump up, face down, hurry up, you’re our last patient of the day and it’s Friday night and I have a party to get to.  Here are some headphones, what kind of music do you like?”

“Um, do you mean, you have an entire collection here?”

“It’s Pandora.  Just pick something.”

I was actually prepared for this.  I did my reading.  I did my research.  I spent a good twenty minutes the night before thinking about what “kind” of music would be appropriate for an MRI. 

“Norah Jones?”  I was kind of hoping I would just fall asleep.

“Great.  Put these on.  Hold this in this hand.  Squeeze it in an emergency.”

“Excuse me, what constitutes an emergency?”

“In you go!  See you in half an hour.”

This sucks.

The machine is loud.  War-zone loud.  And it gives a whole new dimension to the torture in your mind.  In fact, it is more or less matching the torture in your mind since the day you found out you had cancer.  With intermittent alarms going off, loud beeps and violent shaking it more or less sounds like the world is ending.  I haven’t actually been in a war zone, but that didn’t keep me from worrying about flash backs.  Of course you can’t hear anything through the headphone except one or two mouse-like wails from Norah and I should have asked for AC/DC.  Half-way through they come in to fill my veins with something.  And I just pray that the 20-something Jersey girl technician picked up the right bottle off the shelf.  I mean really there’s nothing else to do in there but think about all the things that could go wrong.  

When it was all over, I felt a huge sense of relief.  I survived the scans.  I basked in that for a couple of...minutes...and went out to dinner with Michael and ordered a kale salad.  I saw my life ahead of me in that kale salad.  I was a woman with breast cancer now.  So now I would be ordering kale salads for the rest of my life.  I’d better learn to like this shit.

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Now, since I am a creative type and science was not my best subject in school starting with the day I smelled formaldehyde on a dead frog, I am at a disadvantage when awaiting test results on body scans.  For me, the tingle in my leg means that the cancer in my left breast spread all the way to my right calf in the span of 48 hours.  It’s probably all over my body by now.  I’m definitely going to die  Tomorrow!!  Well, ok, probably not tomorrow but maybe…next week!!  (If you tend to be a little dramatic and you are a fatalist, then you really have no chance at all at common sense.  That’s what cancer has taught me).

And the waiting is the hardest part.  (Did you know Tom Petty was singing about breast cancer?)  My mind went right to the worst.  I woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, completely convinced that I had cancer all over my body.  I sat on the bathroom floor and cried.  Mostly I cried for my kids who would grow up without their mother.  But I also cried for my husband and my parents and my sisters and brothers who would watch me die.  And have to pick up the pieces after I was gone.  In a way, maybe I had the easiest part.  Dying might be preferable to grieving.  What do you think?

But like any mother, I quickly remembered that I didn’t have time or energy for self-pity.  I had two kids who would be waking me up at 6 in the morning, excited to go to the library and the Children’s Museum as promised.  I couldn’t spend the night on the bathroom floor crying like a college girl.  I had to pull it together.  I quickly devised a mantra.  I can’t remember exactly what it was.  I think it was something like: “It’s just in your breast, moron.  It’s just in your breast, moron.”  And that got me through.