Over the first week of this blog I have been documenting what I call the diagnostic phase of my cancer experience. In this post I will briefly recap those posts. I am doing the recap today because I am upgrading the software this blog runs on, and if something goes wrong at least I’m not losing any new content. Tomorrow I will be back to blogging as normal.
Besides my welcome post, the first post about my cancer experience had me asking whether I should have discovered my cancer sooner. This post documented my experience up until middle August of this year. In the end I came to the conclusion that I would not likely have discovered my cancer any sooner due to the lack of cancer-specific symptoms. Really until a lymph node stuck out of my neck it looked like I was having some sort of lung problem.
My next post began with getting the results of a CT scan. This was the first sign of something more serious than just lung problems. My continually deteriorating breathing problems appeared to be caused by a lymph node pushing against my windpipe. I also started to experience (or perhaps started to notice) new symptoms.
After the CT scan I had a biopsy done on the large lymph node sticking out of my neck. In that post I documented my experience getting the biopsy. Going into the biopsy I wish I had read something similar to my post so I knew what to expect.
When the biopsy results came back I had to get a PET scan. The PET scan was necessary due to my biopsy showing I had follicular lymphoma. In this post I not only documented the PET scan experience, but also some of the anxiety I had about the scan.
Yesterday I posted about meeting my oncologist for the first time. I only focused on the first half of that meeting, since the second half will be the subject of my next post. Most of what I remember from first meeting my oncologist was my wife and I determining whether we trusted the oncologist to properly treat my cancer. In the end we both decided the oncologist could be trusted and that doing my cancer treatments locally was a good idea.
At the beginning of this post I noted this was just small recap post. Over the next few days I will blog about seeing the PET scan results, the rush to chemo, getting a port inserted into my chest, and my first chemo experience. For those of you wondering, that all happened in just the last two weeks.
Still praying for you and the rest of the famfamily.