Friday I’m In Love: Clean CAT Scans & Normal Blood Work
We survive another round of Scanxiety™.
For more than a dozen years, my mom has been fighting one type of lymphoma or another. I’d guess that everyone I know has someone in their life who has fought (or is currently fighting) through something similar. The treatments can be brutal, the results frustratingly temporary. But, for the most part, we’re lucky. My mom is still around, even if she now has the immune system of a chronically coughing three-year-old.
You learn to live with a constant/distant level of anxiety when someone you love battles cancer. Every scan is a big deal. Every test result could be catastrophic—or it could be just fine. In our family, we’ve come to call it Scanxiety. It is a thing. And we all deal with it as best we can, which is to say that we mostly pretend it doesn’t exist and we try not to talk about it.
A couple weeks ago, my mom wasn’t feeling great. She was diagnosed with pneumonia and started taking antibiotics. But she didn’t feel much better. And that’s where the Scanxiety kicks in. Any ailment could be a sign of something else. Trouble breathing or feeling fatigued just might be the work of those #$@*ing malignancies that have wreaked so much havoc over the last decade or so… Or, again, it might just be that my mom is 67 years old and she has pneumonia. The only way to know is to wait for the CAT scan and the blood work. Scanxiety.
This time it was a slow two weeks of waiting for the appointment and then a quick couple hours for Dr Glenn (now an honorary member of the Anderson family) and the good folks at the Huntsman Cancer Center to proclaim that the scans were clear and the blood work looked normal. It’s a funny thing when “well, you just can’t breathe very well and you don’t have any energy and we don’t really know why” is good news. Great news. The best news. But that’s where we are.
It’s Friday morning. My mom is fine. And I’m in love with stupid stuff like CAT scans and blood work even though I have no idea how either one of them works (or even what CAT stands for). See you next time, Scanxiety.
Every Friday I share something I love. Usually, it’s a new infatuation. Occasionally, it’s something else. We’ll see how it goes. Thanks for the theme song, Phoebe Bridgers!
