I started my unexpected new life with cancer by taking a walk with my sister Sara. We walk every day and took our default short loop. It was too early to call our parents. The sun wasn’t fully up yet, and I wanted to process it for a moment before making the most difficult call of my life. How do you tell your parents that you have cancer, and that it’s already advanced?
We all cried on the phone, but I felt lucky to already have an appointment with my doctor booked for later that morning. We weren’t going to be talking about headaches anymore. It was difficult in some ways reading the news from the patient portal, but it also let me gather my thoughts, get a notebook to write everything down and plan a list of questions to ask my doctor. I asked Sara to go with me to take notes and help me ask questions, then I took my shower and got ready to go.
My doctor was apologetic that I’d learned the news through the portal, but I told him it didn’t really matter. He was prepared with resources for me and a plan. He told me that I had cancer of some kind, and now we’d need to find out where it started. He ordered a bunch of blood work and walked me through all of the cancer markers he’d ordered. One for ovarian cancer. It’s probably not that, we reasoned, since I’d had it drawn a few months before since I have a family history and it was normal. One for breast cancer, probably not that since my MRI had been normal. “CA 19-9,” he said, “that’s for pancreatic cancer.” I grimaced. “That’s a bad one,” he said “but the CT doesn’t note anything on the pancreas, so it’s probably not that.”
Whew.
He put in an urgent referral to the local MD Anderson cancer center, less than a mile from my house, and told me to call them to schedule if they hadn’t called me within the hour. They called within the hour. We had an appointment the next morning. In the meantime, Sara and I drove to Lafayette, where I’d had my CT done, to get a physical copy of the imaging for my appointment. On the way back we stopped for a sandwich and I ate until I was uncomfortably full. I was going to have to do a lot of that to avoid losing too much weight, and muscle.
That night the results from my bloodwork started to trickle in.