Today is Oncology. Today is results day. I feel fairly calm throughout the morning despite not having had much sleep. We do a quick bit of last minute Christmas shopping on the way to the hospital.  Spital sits reassuringly on the dash. I get a call from the Breast Clinic asking me to come in early as there has been a cancellation. We get there about 20 minutes early but the person who phoned me is no longer at reception so we end up waiting well past our original appointment time. I start to get jittery with all the waiting.

Nurse Bx comes along from the infusion unit and spots us in the waiting area. She comes over and says well done, you’ve made it through. I say I hope so and tell her we are here to get the results of the post treatment CT scan. 

Finally Dr MMc comes out and calls my name. We walk a long way down the corridor and into a consultation room. The Oncologists are trying to see as many people as possible before Christmas so additional rooms are being used. This is also the reason I am seeing Dr MMc instead of Dr Sk today. We joke about him getting his steps in with all the walking to and from reception.

Dr MMc is lucky as his room is at the front of the hospital and has a window. He assures us that the people walking by cannot see in. He asks about my general health, how I’ve been getting on with the hormone therapy and how radiotherapy went. After we discuss my treatments and side effects he says So, you’ve had a recent CT scan. I nod. He follows with well, there are two areas of concern… My heart drops. He’s supposed to say that I have the all clear and that nothing has shown up on the scan. But he doesn’t. Instead he tells me that there are 3 suspicious spots on my liver and one enlarged lymph node in my non-cancerous right armpit that are concerning. None of these were apparent in previous scans. I will now have to have a liver biopsy to see if the spots there are cancerous. Depending on the results I may also need a lymph node biopsy to check that area out.

Oh My God, has the cancer spread? I am numb. I don’t know what to say. I feel like I’ve been transported right back to May when they originally thought the cancer had spread to my chest wall. It hadn’t then. Could I be lucky again? I thought I’d prepared myself for this possibility but I can’t quite believe it. It feels like the treatments, the hospital visits and appointments, the medication, the surgery, the treatment side effects have all been for nothing. I’m in the same place as when I started, just a thinner, weaker, sliced and diced version of myself.

The worst part is that not only do I get this news just before Christmas, I will also have to wait until the New Year to find out for sure where I’m at.

As we leave we run into Bx again. She can see that I am distraught so she takes me into the now empty infusion centre and sits me down. After we chatted in reception she went and asked Dr MMc about my results so she already knows what’s happened. She reassures me that they will be there to help me in the New Year and a treatment plan will be devised. I know she is trying to help but I just want to get out of there. 

We go to the pharmacy, collect more meds and go home. We don’t delay and go up to tell Mum the news. I message my sisters as well. The facts are that my scan has shown some spots in my liver and I have an enlarged lymph node on the right side. We don’t know if it’s cancer or not. I try to remind myself of this. It is, as yet, undetermined.

We don’t know, we don’t know, we don’t know.

C is for Christmas. How am I going to get through this?