I'm radioactive!

Friday update: No blood clot in lungs, no brain bleed. I can start to taper off the steroid!! Hooray! Best news all week. Off to my treat retail therapy!

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I had a couple extra imaging tests this week that were unexpected. The last few days, I've been getting frequent heart palpitations, winded going up stairs, and generally more tired. The oncologist wanted to make sure I didn't have a blood clot in my lungs, so I did a chest ct with angiogram. The iodine for that is not good.

Then the other oncologist wanted a detailed MRI to make sure my severe symptoms from two weeks ago weren't due to a brain bleed. Took a week for authorization for that so it wasn't until this afternoon. More contrast for that one. So in addition to my normal daily radiation treatment, I have 2 types of contrast dyes in my system! Yummy! Do I look bright green yet? Hulk smash?

Anyway, no blood clot, at least not one that they would have sent me to a hospital for. They kept me a few minutes after yesterday just in case there was an emergency situation on the scan, but I don't have the official "all clear" yet. They don't give any indication at all today about the brain bleed possibility, so I do have to wait until the office gets the results this afternoon or tomorrow (not banking on today). I'm not expecting anything too bad since I'm feeling not too terrible right now. I'm tired and my heart beats out of my chest often, but I'd be far worse off if I had bleeding in my brain or a blood clot in my lungs.

I learned a new term this week: No Evidence of Disease, or NED. I like it because it seems so neutral and scientific. Remission makes it seem like a break before another storm. There is no "cure" so that's not a word we can use. "Cancer free" has the C word in it, so that feels aggressive to use. NED just seems matter of factual; we can't tell there's anything in there so for now, we'll see there's no evidence of the disease. Boom. Done. Then we just hope and pray for no new evidence of the disease FOREVER!! So yes, NED is my goal. I'm pretty sure that'll be how it is anyway since immediately following the surgery, they couldn't see any remaining cells on the scans.

Sleep still sucks. Well it doesn't if you can actually get some, it sucks when you can't. Last night was another night of 2 hours of sleep for me. I really want to get the clean MRI report so I can step off this devil medicine!