Oncologist Appointment

I had my six month appointment with the oncologist this morning. Everything looks good.

It was kind of a bad day for the appointment. I felt a head cold coming on last night, and it was worse this morning when I woke up. So I wore a mask to the appointment, something I haven't one in a few years. It was the first of several things that were a little bit off.

Mt GPS took me a different way to the hospital. We're still dealing with piles of snow on the sides of the streets, so traffic was slow. The parking garage at the hospital has open walls, so there was snow everywhere there, too, blocking some spaces. I had to park on a different floor than usual. Whenever anyone called  my name, they said "Robert" instead of "Bob," which is my preferred name in my chart. The room where they take my vitals was blocked off, so I went into a waiting room where other people were sitting, and they did my BP and temperature on a portable machine. 

None of this is normally a big deal. Who cares which floor of the garage I park on, you know? But when my goal at an oncologist appointment is to have everything be "stable," even small bits of instability are noticeable. Maybe I'm just superstitious.  But I didn't feel as good as I usually do going into an appointment.

But as I said, everything was OK. Nothing abnormal on the physical exam he always does -- nothing swelling that shouldn't be swelling. He commented on how long it had been since I had a scan, and saw that I'd had some scanning done on my heart recently, so he took a look at that just to check in on the lymph nodes near my collar bones. "They look great," he said. "Nice bonus to see them on the heart CT scan."

Bloodwork was also solid. We're keeping track of one of the numbers that my General Practitioner flagged as a little high. Interesting, she and my oncologist are in two different hospital systems, and hers says the number was just over the normal limit, and his system said it was within normal range. Still, he said it was something we'd keep an eye on, and that I shouldn't worry about it.

We talked a little about the weather, and about the Winter Olympics -- we were both big fans of the 90's music theme in the Ice Dancing Competition yesterday. (I had a hard time deciding which Ice Dancing duo to link a video of, so I went with the Italians skating to Backstreet Boys. You always have to choose the Backstreet Boys.)

So, nothing much interesting to report. 

Which is good, because we like things to be uninteresting when it comes to Lymphoma.

I'm going to take a nap and then hope the day feels a little less off. Having a good report from the oncologist always helps.