Visit to the Oncologist

I had an oncologist appointment this morning. Everything looks fine.

To be honest, this appointment snuck up on me -- I forgot to put it on the calendar, and I only remembered because it they gave me a reminder call yesterday. This was about 3 months since my last visit; I think I made it a month shorter than usual because I knew once school started up for everybody that things would get their usual crazy, so I'd do it before then.

I think that's a good thing that I had forgotten about it. Forgetting = not worrying = not having any problems to worry about. It was kind of the theme for this visit.

For whatever reason, Dr. R didn't have me do blood work first, like he usually does. Maybe I came in late? I still get confused about my appointment time. Because the practice is now officially a branch of the cancer hospital, I have two separate appointments -- one for a blood draw and one for the onc visit. So when they say the appointment is at 11:15, I don't know if that's for the onc or the blood. So maybe I was supposed to be there for blood work at 11:00, so he took me in at 11:15 so I would stay on schedule for him? I don't know. Still not crazy about this new set up.

Anyway, the physical exam was fine. He didn't find anything popping up that shouldn't be popping up anywhere. And then he gave me his serious face and said, "I know we've been kind of going back and forth about this, but we should probably think about a scan soon...."

"Wait," I interrupted. "I had a scan in June."

"Really?"

My wife backed me up on this.

He looked at my online records and saw that I had indeed gotten a scan in June. We talked about the results, even though we had talked about them back then. He was pleased with the results, as he should have been. And then I gave him crap for the rest of the visit.

"Jeez, doctor. I've been coming here for six and half years. I thought I was more memorable than that."

He smiled. "I think it's better for you to not be memorable."

And he's right. If I was a patient who was in the middle of treatment, or if I was a particularly tough Follicular Lymphoma case that kept recurring, or if the scan was really troubling, then maybe I would have been on his mind. But I'm just a slow-growing, waxing-and-waning, see-you-every-four-months-for-a-few-minutes kind of patient. And I can't complain about that. I'll take forgettable if those are my choices.

Plus, it's just so much fun to give him a hard time about something.

It turned out that, because I went to a new place for the scan, he was looking in the wrong place in my file for the information. An honest enough mistake, I guess.

He ordered blood work after that, and gave me a thumbs-up 5 minutes later when everything there appeared normal.

So overall, it was a good visit. An unexpected one, but a good one. I go back in late December -- I hope to have no health news for you until then.