Scan Day

November 15, 2021

“I’ll see you in three months, after the next scan,” the doc said. “But things are looking good.”

I was hoping for a six-month stretchout for the CT scans. This latest one was the 17th over three years, and they are getting old. Maybe he’ll go to six after the next one. But three or six, the drill is always the same.

The scan event was on the Marine Corps’ 246th birthday, the day before Veterans Day, which I wanted to celebrate some other way. First things first. A covid-symptoms interrogation at the hospital door, then check-in. “You’re getting a CT?” the receptionist asks. “Name and birthdate?” 

She handed me one of those radio-receiver discs restaurants use to keep track of people who have to wait for a table. Same principle. The disc blinks and buzzes when they’re ready for you.

All the patients are staring at their cell phones, aware the wait could be—whatever. Hospitals are short-staffed, but never short on patients.  A sign is posted outside: “Now Hiring Nurses and CNAs—Signing Bonus!” I brought a book and thumbed to my page. But soon my disc buzzed. “Name and birthdate,” the woman at the desk asked. Sitting beside her was the woman to whom I had just given the information.

She led me to a tiny office. We did the questions about current/recent health, shots, prescriptions (none). She pointed at a waiting room. A nurse asked for my name and birthdate. She swabbed my arm, jabbed me, and hooked up the IV tube. She handed me the two cups of water mixed with a solution that enhances the contrast dye. I waited in the outer office for an hour for the solution to work.

Done with that, a technician called me into the procedure room. “I’m Lauren,” she said with a smile. She pointed to the platform next to the scanner. I climbed aboard. She pumped the contrast into the IV, I felt a jolting chill, then sudden heat as it rushed into my bloodstream.

She started the scanner and slid me inside. I stared at inner core of the machine, spinning and flashing. “Hold your breath,” the machine ordered. Then “Breathe.” We did this three or four times, the CT scanner and I, working as a team. That was it. Lauren flipped a switch, I jumped up, thanked her, and headed for the parking lot.

The report was ready later that day. I keyed on the impression line: “no evidence of new recurrent or new metastatic disease.” That’s the upbeat story. Two days later, at the Prisma Cancer Institute, though, the oncologist looked at the fine print. He held up the report and pointed at page 1: “left paramediastinal bronchiectasis and fibrosis appears unchanged.” He nodded. “That’s always going to be there,” he said.

Two years ago the primary care and the pulmonary-critical care doctors in Virginia talked about bronchiectasis, a lung condition caused by 33 sessions of radiation bombing my chest, or “mediastinum,” the area between the lungs occupied by the heart, windpipe, and esophagus—the food tube—and thymus, which is where my real problem began. It pushed the kidney procedure, the “nephrectomy” out by a year. Another 30 sessions this year didn’t help.

He delivered the message, all systems look good, that is, “unchanged,” but this thing is not over. I recall my son, the medical physicist, telling me in 2018 that they never get every cell.

That done, we relaxed and talked about other things. Because it seemed like an obvious topic, I said I just got the covid booster. He asked about side effects, and said he hoped he’d get lucky because his second shot knocked him back for a few days.

I didn’t ask him what he thought of the school board in this fairly good-size town announcing that local schools would not serve as vaccination sites for children, although the vaccine now is approved for ages 5 through 11. Parents will have to hunt for it at pediatricians’ offices or drugstores.

A few days ago the South Carolina School Board cut ties with the National School Board Association over a letter the NSBA sent to President Biden seeking a federal investigation of reports of attacks on and threats of violence against its members over covid measures like masks. The SCSB said the letter “did not represent the values we have in South Carolina.”

Meanwhile, new cases are up 11 percent this week in South Carolina.

We moved away from all that, he refocused on the report, bullet point by bullet point. Heart, liver, pancreas, the rest look okay, apart from 72 years of wear and tear. I always like the note: “left kidney: absent,” as if it was out of town the day of the scan. The report frequently uses “appears” in citing normal conditions. Is it the TV weather-reporter shtick, the “chance of showers” routine that allows escape from ever being wrong?

He extended his hand, I took it, gratified we’re not bumping fists, which like my scan routine, has gotten old. “See you in three months. But call me if anything comes up,” he said. “Happy Holidays!” he yelled as he headed out the door. I yelled “Thanks” and ran for the exit.

The cancer patients in the waiting room, some of them in wheelchairs with family members, all of them with thick masks, didn’t notice me pass. Their minds are elsewhere, on symptoms, treatments, prescriptions, bills, as mine was when I was a daily visitor there. Some of these folks will not be having happy holidays. Yet it is a place of hope and courage. I know if I studied their faces I’d recognize some of them again in three months, still showing courage, still filled with hope.