Living in the highly unlikely

I got the CT scan the day after my last post. It was clear, clean, no sign of anything. Which seems like really good news, right? Well, it is, but. But that doesn't mean there's no cancer in there, only that it exists at a microscopic level. The CA-125 doesn't work as an indicator of cancer for every person, but if it does (and in my case, it does), then it's pretty accurate. I read somewhere 98% accurate as a means of detecting disease in the body. So now what?

Now we do what's called "watch and wait." We wait until the end of May, take the blood test again and see what the number is. If it's way up from 46, then it's pretty clear that I'll need to start chemo again. If it stays the same, or only goes up a little, then it could mean that the maintenance drug is holding the cancer back, that there's maybe like 5% in my body. But what if the number goes down?, I ask the doctor. She says that is highly unlikely.

For about 10 days after that phone call, I decided I would live in the Highly Unlikely. I would magically think the number down. Then I googled ways to do that naturally (spoiler alert: there aren't any). Seem the only way to get it down is to not have cancer. I'm sure there are supplements that claim they can do it anyway. But that stuff scares me.

After that 10 days, I kind of settled into this funny space where i know intellectually that the cancer is back, but because the scan was clean and the number low-ish, I can live in this in-between space. Like from now until May 27 when I get my next set of labs, anything is possible.

Well, some people will say anything is always possible, but it's hard to keep that smile on your face in the face of something like this. Still. Until I see some astronomical number, I can keep pretending it was all just a little glitch, a bump in the road, a wee detour. The numbers can go up, the numbers can come back down.

Stay tuned for a poem on this subject.