The Scan and The Results

The first week of my eighth year as a cancer patient has featured anxiety from the past and worries about the future. It started with a CT scan, my sixth since a tumour was successfully removed from my abdomen twenty months ago. The pathologist found that this tumour had a very slim margin of normal cells around it; only one millimetre, a dangerously narrow margin and far below the recommended surgical limits. Allied to this is the fact that you don’t feel a slow growing tumour when it is small. And it also doesn’t show up well on a scan. I didn’t have pain from either of my tumours until they had grown to maturity and were over six centimetres across. At scan-time these worries cannot fail to prey upon your mind and interrupt your sleep in the small hours.

Actually having a CT scan is nothing much; on the scale of painful and unpleasant things done to you in hospital it is at the low end. You have to arrive at the Cancer Centre one hour before the time of your scan. You sit in a waiting room full of people coming for scans and drink a clear fluid filled with iodine (and other stuff) that enhances the images. You have to drink two litres of the fluid, one paper cupful every ten minutes. Despite the room being full, it is deathly quiet; nobody speaks, we are all in our private places of fear. The only sounds are new patients arriving, jugs of fluid being dispensed and patients being called. I sit, sip and read my newspaper. Others surf the internet. Some stare into space.

When called, you are taken into a changing cubicle where you remove your clothes and anything made of metal and put on a surgical gown. The radiographer takes you into the scanning room next door. The CT scanner is shaped like a large ring doughnut with a long slim bed that slides you inside it. The scanner costs about a million quid. A scan takes around ten minutes. The bed slides you through the scanner and an automated voice tells you to hold your breath for some of the passes and to breathe on others. The scanner whines and howls like a gale as it spins around you. Then it is over and you can go.

The first thing I do is get something to eat and drink. You aren’t allowed to take anything for six hours before the scan. I ride the lift up the hospital tower to the staff cafeteria. The food is cheap and fatty. It’s remarkable how bad the food is for people who are charged with keeping us healthy. Off-duty, hospital staff could well be far unhealthier than us. Like many others, I indulge in a greasy fry. It hits the spot. As I slurp baked beans and chew my sausages, the worries begin in earnest. I have entered the worst and most disempowered stage, the anxious waiting for the scan results.

Normally you hear the results at a review appointment with the Oncologist, which takes place a couple of terrible weeks after the scan. As it is hospital practice to send out appointment letters two weeks beforehand, you usually get the letter for the review appointment around the date of your scan. I went home. There was no letter from the hospital. I waited anxiously for a couple of days. Then I rang the Oncologist’s secretary. You always get the answer-phone. I left a message for her to call me. She rang back the next day and told me that my scan had been done several weeks early and no appointment had been booked for me yet. She told me she would request an urgent appointment, but that the review clinics for the next month were very full. My heart sank and my worries spiked.

Several sleepless nights and unhappy days later, the Oncologist’s secretary rang me (after I had again left her a message). The good news was that she had a got me a review appointment, the bad news was that it was in a month’s time. Again my heart sank. But, she went on, she had spoken with the Oncologist and they had dictated a letter to me. She read it out. The crucial part was that the Radiologist had concluded that my scan was ‘stable’ with ‘no discernible change’. My heart leapt. I thanked her profusely. She had understood my problem and because of the long delay in me actually seeing the Oncologist had found a way of breaching the hospital protocol about not giving results over the phone. I suddenly felt very relieved and extremely exhausted.