July 3rd

Well, July just doesn't seem to be my month in general. Doctor C showed me the MRI pics. There's a suspicious 'spot' way down deep on the back of my tongue. Not a surface spot (or tumor) like I had on my tongue but a deep tissue spot. He scoped me and did some probing with fingers and mirrors. He said he can feel an abnormality down in there but can't really tell much from the feel of it. He said only ~5% of patients have cancer reoccur in an area that has been radiated. Which is why radiation docs usually refer to themselves as the "one and done" docs. Plus he says radiation changes the terrain of the area that has been radiated anyway so it's hard for surgeons to be able to tell if something wonky is going on in those areas or not. So, step one is to get a PET scan. This is the scan where I have to fast the night before, then they shoot me up with sugar, and then I get stuck in a body sized mail tube to get scanned. Cancer loves sugar so if there's cancer present, the sugar will all conglomerate around it and light it up like a Christmas tree. This was also the scan where I had to take the anxiety medicine beforehand and had to have someone drive me. I'm going to have to tap someone to be my chauffeur when this thing gets scheduled. And it will take a week or two to get it scheduled because all PET scans have to be approved by the insurance company first. And then according to Dr. C, 100% of them get denied. And then he has to get on the phone and tell the nice insurance people exactly why he is recommending the scan at which point they usually approve it. He said it's a bunch of bullshit hoops that docs have to jump through. He also wrote me out a prescription for Vicodin to help manage the pain. He said THAT whole process will be getting a lot more complicated come August as well. There's going to be some website that he has to log into whenever he wants to prescribe a narcotic to make sure I haven't been doctor hopping and getting pain meds from numerous different docs. Sheesh!

Anyway, if the PET scan shows that it COULD very well be cancer then he will make an appointment for me to come in so he can biopsy the area. It's done right in his office but he will put me to sleep for it and it takes about 30 minutes.

If it IS cancer, it's in a really hard to reach area. He said that if he performed the surgery, he'd have to split my jaw in half and swing the lower half of my face out to get to it. He says there's a guy in town though that does surgeries like this with a robotic arm so that splitting the jaw isn't necessary. He thinks I would be a good candidate for that.

But we get ahead of ourselves. PET scan first. I took Kunkel to this appointment. She said Dr. C was nothing like what she was picturing from the comments I made about him. She said he actually seemed fairly personable. I'm not sure if it was her influence or if he had a good day but he actually was pretty personable. Still rambled off on a lot of tangents, brutally described different paths that might need to be taken, and didn't give any concrete answers to any questions asked...........but he was somewhat personable despite all that. :-)