Restricted Area - Deadly Force Authorized

Cancer is a full-time job.  And most encounters with cancer are so counter-intuitive and changeable that trust and understanding become relative terms.

For those of you who are new to it all, start off with the absolute best doctor you can possibly find. I don't mean just someone that you get along with, but rather someone who has a national reputation of being a Top Doc. 
Because even if they can't cure you, at least they'll be working in a really nice facility and everyone around them will do exactly as they ask. Immediately.
And the Top Doc will usually schedule you with the Top Radiologist and Top Nurses etc. so there's a huge positive domino effect that you'll be experiencing as long as you have cancer. 

I went back to the Cancer Center last Tuesday.  Withstanding the mental echos of the obvious yet still oddly amusing dog (lab) and cat jokes, I had another blood draw for the lab, and another CaT scan to see if my lumps are growing. 

Now that I no longer have ovaries, my cancer lumps (tumors) are just clusters of ovarian cancer cells who are quite happy to park in various places in my abdomen. Like on top of my liver.  And on top of whatever other squishies I still might have in there.   

My abdomen is like a cocktail party for ovarian cancer cells, where the little clusters gradually grow and get a bit more rowdy as time ticks on. It's all calm and controllable until one group has a few too many and next thing you know they're all over the place and dashing into areas that should have been off limits.

When I started the MEK trial about 6 weeks ago, I was told that if my tumors grew 20% larger, they'd assume that this drug didn't work well for me and I'd be taken off the trial. These latest scans showed that the tumors grew 14%.  
So. . . do I quit? Carry on calmly?   No easy answers. If I quit the MEK trial, I can't go back.
So then, if the next type of chemo let my tumors grow 25%, I'd be looking back on a 14% growth rate as a GOOD thing.  When I'm on my deathbed, I'll remember how the little cocktail-party ("tiki-tumors!") that I have right now were so easy!

So on Thursday it was back again for a yellow-eye test and a Mugga test. Not sure what a Mugga test is, but it's for your heart and they give you a radioactive injection first. Really!

The radioactive fluid really does make you show up on a Geiger counter (I asked).
I wondered. . . will I be flushing radioactive waste? I asked about that, too. The lab tech (human) explained how that because the fluid he was injecting into me had a half-life of 6 hours, it would become inert in 12 hours.
That was not particularly reassuring to someone like me whose water source is their well, and who flushes into a septic system. And who pees about once every sixteenth-life.

But you know, with farm animals drinking out of streams at our place and everything all organic here. . .you gotta think about these things.

Maybe I'm over-reacting.   But I can't help but worry.

We're used to seeing variety in our eggs. . .

 

        But what the heck is THIS?!

     
At least my hair is finally growing.   I wonder. . .

And y'all know that there is no way I could post this without including a link to David Bowie unbleached version of Life on Mars:  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1fcpCrRJ34