Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Finally, we hear about the tonsil

Joe completed his chemo in January and has gradually been making his way back to 100% normal, riding his bike, working like a fiend, cooking dinner again (thank goodness), growing his hair back, and generally astounding me with his resilience, good humor and general cuteness. The one little thing we've been still worrying about is this Something on his tonsil, the Something that was still on the PET-scan after 4 rounds of chemo and which is still there. He had an MRI a few weeks ago and heard from the oncologist today. Finally.

Dr. Maloney said that what the Something is exactly remains unknown, but that it's good news that it's not a big tumor. Phew. It's a "minimal soft-tissue asymmetry." I don't recommend Googling that. I already did, and it wasn't helpful at all. Joe will see the Ear Nose and Throat specialist, whose name -- fabulously enough -- is Dr. Chin [that cracks me up no end]. Chin will either biopsy the mass on the tonsil and tell us more, or remove it altogether, biopsy it, then tell us all about it.

So really we don't know very much at all, except that I suppose it could be a lot worse. Dr. Maloney could have called and said, "Holy Shit, dude, you have a huge tumor in your throat!" but that's not what happened. We have this vague minimal soft-tissue asymmetry to explore, instead.

As usual we're staying optimistic, dealing with one thing at a time and trying not to get ahead of ourselves. When we have more news, we'll shout it from the rooftops. In the meantime, we're happy and loving every minute.

1 comment:

yoshiko said...

Sending you love and positiveness -- yoshiko