Ants In My Pants

     I have so much enjoyed all the tumor-fruit-comparison suggestions from near and far (finger limes, okra, even 3 olives on a swizzle stick--so sophisticated and celebratory) and, of course, I am so appreciative of all the happy and supportive messages from so many!  It has been keeping the smile stuck on my face!  Don't you feel like we did this together?  I do!
     We are still waiting it out as far as insurance approval for the proton beam, with no indication of how long this wait could go on.  There was a little bit of a hitch in my giddyup this past week when, instead of high-fiving me and slapping the Seal of Remission on my chest, the second hematology oncologist said yeah, well, hmm, I'd like my peeps to take a look at this PET because I think the summary is a little ambiguous and I just want to make sure and if they don't think the tumor is fully negative I'd like you to have another biopsy and...basically  it was needle-scratch-stop-that-happy-dance-music.
     Talk about being a killjoy.  A wet blanket.  A party pooper.  Raining on someone's parade.  Bursting someone's bubble.  Putting a damper on things.  Pissing in someone's cornflakes, to put it indelicately.
     It was a true test of my ability to stay positive, to resist the urge to catastrophize, to stay in the moment, and to avoid stressing out about things that are beyond my control.
    Sadly, I was nowhere near as successful in that endeavor as I'd eventually like to be--I had nightmares about bronchoscopies and was turning into a little bit of a "what if" basket case.
     But the oncologist called me on Friday and said her peeps concurred with the previous findings regarding the tumor.  Whew!
     However, she did leave me with this little nugget:  If I can get the proton beam, she definitely recommends it.  But if I can't, after consulting with various colleagues, she would have "reservations" about doing the regular IMRT radiation because the area to be radiated is right next to my heart.
     I asked her what she would do if she were me.  That was silly of me--I'm sure the litigious society we live in dictates I wouldn't get a straight response to that question.  The most I could get was "it would give me pause."
     Hmph.  THAT wasn't a very satisfactory answer.
     So I'm curious if, once seeing the current PET and having read the summary (and the "new" summary), Dr. Ray Donc would feel the same way.  Questions, questions.
     All that being said, until we get the word one way or the other on the proton beam, all of this is just an academic discussion.  And I'm not going to chew on this too much until I have to.  I'm not trying to be Queen of Denial...just trying to avoid the catastrophizing, etcetera, that I mentioned previously.
     But I am more than eager to get a date on the calendar; the sooner the treatment starts, the sooner it will end, and I would honestly like to wrap this all up in a nice bow and be done with it.
     Last but not least, for anyone who is participating in a hair pool, here's the skinny on what's going on up top:  After buzzing the fuzz down quite a few times, it looks like my hair is coming in all the way around, certainly thicker each time it has started growing back.  So I'm going to leave it alone for now and just let it keep growing.  As for color, well, it looks like Raiders Nation here:  Black and silver, baby.  Yep,  I kid you not.  Silver, not so much a surprise.  But black?  I wouldn't have guessed that in a million years.