Scanxiety

Don't you just love made-up words? Usually they reflect our new technological society- blogosphere, technocrat, yuppies, IM, texting, sexting...  Scanxiety is a combo of scan and anxiety and, as every metastatic breast cancer patient knows, scans, which are usually repeated every three months, are definitely anxiety- inducing exercises.

No matter how much you tell yourself that it's just another test, it's amazing how the anxiety builds up. I couldn't sleep Sunday night, awaiting my first PET scan (alas, nothing to do with Homer or pets). I had been doing CATscans (again, nothing to do with pets, but somehow this strikes me now as sinister) and Nuclear Bone scans.   The advantage of the PET was greater sensitivity, measuring metabolic activity, instead of tumor images.You were injected with radioactive glucose, waited quietly for 45 minutes while it spread throughout your body and then were slowly scanned over the course of an hour from your "kneecaps to your eyeballs"(as the tech explained it).

I had heard from a friend that too much activity prior to the scan would cause the PET to light up, giving a false positive. For example, she knew someone who spent her 45 minute quiet time writing Christmas cards and her arm lit up like a Christmas tree on the scan.

My PET scan tech scoffed at this story but I was determined to minimize my movement, just in case. I settled into the chair and carefully used my pinky finger to turn the pages of my book from the bottom, very slowly. What if i got an itch, was annoyed by a pesky fly or had to blow my nose? My stomach rumbled, crying out for food and I wondered how movements along the digestive tract registered?  What if I started burbing or got the hiccups? The anxiety meter ticked up a few notches. My eye did start to itch and I had to scratch it- once, twice, three times. Man, I could already see me written up in the medical journals, the only bc patient with weird metastases to the right eyeball.

The scan itself was uneventful, but I didn't drift off to sleep. The pallet seemed a bit narrow and as I was progressively moved into the tube, I had to first hold my arms out like I was flapping them like chicken wings and then put them all the way over my head. The tube ceiling was a pleasant six inches above my head, unlike the Nuclear bone scan which involves a flat panel descending to within an inch of your face. I always used to watch that panel as it slowly dropped, feeling like the character in a Stephen King story who was completely paralyzed but alive, lying on an autopsy table, unable to scream as the pathologist's scalpel descended.  At least I would be able to scream if the machine didn't stop. After that moment of sheer terror, I would close my eyes. You had to or you'd go cross-eyed and claustrophobic.  Compared to the bone scan, this PETscan was a piece of cake.

When the test was over, the smiling tech sent me off with these parting words: "Don't go near children or pregnant women for the rest of today and drink lots of water to wash out the isotope."  Suddenly, I was Homer Simpson leaving the nuclear power plant with a glowing green rod stuck in my back pocket. Did anyone worry about the net effect of all this radiation?!  Yes, Virginia, your cancer is under control, but you seem to be developing a third eye and I don't mean the yoga kind.

Now the real anxiety began--waiting for the results to determine if the cancer had spread (bad), was stable (good), decreased (very good) or NED (excellent!)

Ah, the elusive NED. When I first joined the cancer message boards, I was full of admiration for this guy NED. He really got around.
TexasCowGrrl: "Dancing with NED for the last 6 months and it's heavenly." 
PinkHotMama: "I've been dancing with NED for 3 months now and couldn't agree more."

Uh oh, was this going to turn into a nasty catfight? Who was this mystery man? He seemed like a bit of a cad--did he think he was as smooth as James Bond, as handsome as George Clooney, as fluid on his feet as Fred Astaire?

MarksGrandma: "Everyone deserves a whirl around the dance floor with NED."

What a guy! But where did MarksGrandpa weigh in on the NED issue? Did he approve?

I finally figured it out when GroovyChica posted:
"My dance with NED ended this week with my latest scan showing progression to the liver." 
Damn and it had all seemed so much fun.

A quick Google explained that NED is No Evidence of Disease, but you have to love that carefree image of women celebrating a break in the disease with a swirling, twirling, tangoing around the ballroom floor, their celebrity spin a la Dancing with the Stars.

I've not had the privilege yet of Dancing with NED. I'm still in the trenches--"wrestling the alligator."  This one was not so hard to figure out, except i was thrown off because the first post was from GatorGal.
GG: "Had a tough week, wrestling the alligator."
Hmm, maybe she really was an alligator wrestler?  You used to see those signs for authentic Seminole Indian alligator wrestlers at Alligator World somewhere in South Carolina, Georgia or Northern Fla, if you ever took the long Spring Break drive to Fla. But, no, according to the posts, there seemed to be alligator wrestlers all over the country and I didn't think there was a sudden explosion of carny freak shows with the alligator wrestlers next to the bearded lady and the sword swallower.

Yesterday ended well for me: anxiety dispelled, cancer under control, me right in there with the other alligator wrestlers. A sad note: Elizabeth Edwards is at the end of her struggle--not quite 4 years.