Month: January 2025

Today, a shortish update.

This week I had my follow-up CT and MRI scans done. The CT was on Monday and done locally. The MRI was on Friday and done in Winnipeg, at the St. Boniface hospital. This is the hospital my surgeon works out of, and he was adamant that the MRI be done there as well. Not sure why! We plan to ask him later.

If you’ve never had a CT scan, allow me to offer a brief description! First you are asked to get down to your undies and socks in a small change area, and put on a hospital gown instead. I’m not thrilled about the gowns because I can never tie them up properly. Then you’re led into the room and made to lay on a table in front of a smallish, ring-shaped machine. The tech starts an IV with a “contrast fluid” that’s meant to make certain parts of you show up more clearly on the imaging. Also, they’ll warn you that it will 1.) make you feel kinda warm and 2.)make you feel like you’ve peed your pants when in fact you have not.

Then they leave the room and the table moves to put the parts that need imaging into the centre of the ring. A pre-recorded voice instructed me when to breathe, hold, and exhale. And in just a few minutes it was done! Really, just when I was settling my mind in for the long haul, so I was quite surprised when the tech re-entered the room and said we were all finished.

No long-term side effects from the contrast fluid, though I was advised to drink plenty of water over the next day or two in order to flush the contrast from my system. I’d meant to take myself out for breakfast that day (to reward myself for being a Big Brave Boy). However, I needed to get back home because my sister-in-law was watching the kids who would otherwise have been unsupervised (not ideal).

If you’ve never had an MRI before, allow me to offer a brief description! It’s a lot like the CT, only the machine is a lot bigger, noisier, dangerous, and slower. Because you see, it works with extremely powerful magnets! I was asked three different times — one paper survey, two nurses — about any potential metals in my body as the result of injuries or implants. It isn’t rational, but I start to worry that I might secretly have metal in my body that I just haven’t remembered (I don’t). The process of preparing and imaging took quite a bit longer, not to mention the drive time. But the nurses were very pleasant and it turns out I have very little problem with confined spaces, so the experience wasn’t particularly stressful.

You have time to let your mind wander in an MRI, and in this one there were two things I really wanted to know, but I’ll sadly never get the answers. One was: how did that small dark smudge get on the inside of the machine? It almost looked like a fingerprint. What was the story there? And the second, which I noticed midway through the imaging, was: how did that tiny ball bearing get there? It was stuck to the inside of the machine because of magnetism, but where is it from? Is it important? Who knows.

In both cases I was assured that my doctors would get the results in less than a week, but I don’t think I’ll know any more until either the chemo doc visit in early February, or meeting the surgeon after that. So we continue to wait and hope for good outcomes. In the meantime, like I’ve said before: we try not to let our minds wander to dark places, and instead do things that bring you calm and joy, like LEGOs.

This week, we found the waiting to be difficult. The days have been full of normal things; work, school for the kids, pickups and dropoffs at extra-curriculars, etc. And they haven’t been bad at all. But Lori and I have both found, in the quiet moments, a tendency to worry.

It actually hadn’t occurred to me to worry about my test results before this last week. I’ve probably written before about my over-optimistic tendencies — the belief that things like this will just work out. The treatments worked, I tell myself. Why wouldn’t they have? And it wasn’t until this past week, spurred on by a minor but persistent sort of ache in my core muscles, that I finally had the thought:

well, what if the treatments didn’t work?

Or they did, but not enough, and things have spread. Or any number of other worrisome scenarios. It wasn’t a shattering thought, but it is difficult for me to acknowledge and face some of the bad outcomes that might be in my future.

The tummyache went away, and I’m still optimistic overall. Mostly we’re kind of at a place of wanting to get on with it. Which I will, with a CT scan tomorrow morning, followed by an MRI at the end of the week.

It’s probably gonna be fine. I’m sure it will. Well, mostly.

Changing the subject; sometimes, since my diagnosis, people have asked if I’ve ‘lost weight’. It’s meant as a compliment but I don’t know what folks are seeing — I mean, you looked at the comparison photos a couple of posts ago, and the scales at the hospitals always come out pretty much the same. I appreciate that folks are trying to be nice! But actually, as I would reply to people, I’m not supposed to be losing weight during this time. Visibly losing weight would actually be concerning; the doctors and my dietitian agreed at the outset of this journey that losing weight should not be a goal as my body will need its reserves of energy to help in getting through treatments.

I will never get upset to anyone’s face about this comment, but let’s be honest; if I’d lost my hair and looked ‘sicker’ it would not be something folks would offer as a compliment. And I’ll be honest again and say I’ve definitely stepped in this one myself; a few years ago I ran into an acquaintance after not seeing them for some time, and since they were noticeably thinner I asked, as a compliment, “have you lost weight?”

“Yes, stomach cancer will do that to you,” came the reply. And I felt…not very good. They weren’t upset with me, but their tone was so resigned that I got the sense this was something that came up a lot for them. And it wasn’t anything to celebrate.

So! Let’s agree not to comment on the body sizes of cancer patients! Actually, let’s go one step further and agree not to comment on the body sizes of other people, like, at all. We don’t really know what journey somebody’s on, and it just doesn’t seem like a helpful thing to focus on!

Hello from Nearly Two Weeks Into 2025. I wrote last entry that my new battery of tests would have started by now but I was wrong. I had a checkup entry on my phone’s calendar, but there was nothing in the Noona app about it, and when I called to confirm they said it had been cancelled. Good thing we found out before driving an hour-and-a-half to the big city. It’s been rescheduled, so my checkups and imaging will actually start on the 20th now.

It seems I’ve never mentioned Noona! Way back in May — less than a year ago but also ages, somehow — I was encouraged to install the Noona app on my phone after one of our first visits. It’s what CancerCare uses to keep patients on top of upcoming appointments, and it also has a built-in messaging system so that you can reach out easily if you have questions about treatments, side effects, what have you. It isn’t perfect but it has been pretty valuable throughout this journey. Actually, what’s sort of funny is that the Radiation techs told me to turn off notifications from the app; in summer it was pinging me multiple times per day, because radiation appointments shift forward and back by small increments of time on a regular basis. Eventually, CancerCare just disabled notifications for everybody, because the pings were getting so exhausting for patients that it was a hindrance rather than a help. They’re still not back on.

Anyway, if you were curious, that’s just one of the tools that you’re given as a cancer patient in Manitoba!

I had a virtual interview with Laura from the CancerCare Manitoba Foundation on Friday. I’ll be featured as part of a fundraising push for World Cancer Day (Tuesday, February 4th), so we talked about an overview of my journey thus far and how my diagnosis has affected my life. This will help put human faces to the work that the Foundation does, and I figured, if I can do anything to raise some funds so that the next patient’s journey is a little easier, I’m gonna do it.

One thing she asked was about my future goals, or rather, was there something in particular that has been driving me to get through the difficulties of treatment and so on. I cited my kids; they had already come up several times in our conversation, and I’ve been telling everyone since last year that I’ll do whatever it takes to be there for the milestones in their lives. That hasn’t changed! But I also added: my goal is to get an air fryer.

I alluded to it in my very first journal post, but one thing that this unexpected journey did was upend our house renovation plans. After years of debate and hemming & hawing, Lori and I were on the cusp — the very brink! — of engaging a contractor to renovate our kitchen and dining area. We had the plans drawn up and were just waiting to hear back from our chosen contractor about when they could start. The air fryer comes into play here because we don’t currently have available countertop or storage space to keep one, and I’m pretty sure I would use one of those bad boys every single day. So before my diagnosis, my joke during our planning stages was that we were renovating the house just to fit an air fryer in.

Well. When we got the news of my diagnosis, one of the first things we agreed on was that it probably wasn’t wise to tear the house apart while also trying to deal with treatments and appointments and the things of that nature. So with much sadness, I called the contractor back and said that everything’s on hold for the foreseeable future. We’ve held on to the hope that our plan can still go ahead one day. Lori often looks wistfully around the kitchen and sighs about how much better it’s going to be. Unfortunately, we still know very little about the prospect of surgery and associated recovery times. But we still have the plans, and the funding, and we have to keep hoping things will become more normal and it’ll work. Because I was this close to getting my air fryer, and I still want it.

(I’ll be surprised if the CCMBF puts any of this in my donation biography.)

Happy New Year!

The late nights and early mornings of the Christmas season caught up to me this week, and it’s been yawns aplenty while I try and get through the days. Hopefully, with the end of the kids’ holidays we can all go back to something like a normal schedule starting tomorrow.

We had an extended family gathering yesterday, and one of my wife’s Aunties put words to a conundrum I’ve experienced more than once in the past year; in a social setting, what is the correct number of people that I want to ask about how my cancer journey is going? If too many people ask, it gets exhausting and my answers become rote. If nobody asks, I start to wonder if anybody cares anymore. (Neither of these are the problems of other people, I should add — this is a ‘me’ problem for sure)

So what would I consider the correct number of people? Is it three? I bet it’s three. I haven’t decided and won’t be releasing the number, if I do.

Unrelated, this is a selfie I took back in June, shortly before my first round of radiation / chemotherapy treatments started. (I added the Undertale text box just now). I was curious and wanted to chart the physical changes that might occur over the months.

Well, this is from the end of December, once everything was done, and…huh! Pretty much the same guy? Except with a beard, obviously. (Please ignore the mound of stuff on our kitchen island in the background, thank you). I’ve had a few people comment IRL that they thought I’d lost weight, but I don’t think I really have, at least if the weigh-ins at treatments and blood draws are anything to go by. Maybe my beard is slimming somehow.

You can’t tell so much from these pictures but there’s definitely more ‘salt’, or grey hairs, creeping into my hair and beard. Though, whether that was driven by the hardships of treatment or just me continuing to age is debatable.

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Lastly, the first of my battery of tests starts this week. It’s a checkup with my chemo doc. In the next few weeks I’ve got more bloodwork, plus a CT, MRI, and ‘scope I mentioned in the previous post. In the meantime I’ve rejoined the Prairie Singers choir for this season; it remains to be seen whether my other life stuff will interfere with my practices and performance, but I was advised last year not to stop doing the things I love because I might have to quit them at some point. We don’t know! So I’m going to try and assume the best.