My cancer diary:
Wednesday - February 7, 2001
[total: day 3]

"It has been a hard and cruel time since Monday. I have not yet learned to cope with the pain from the surgery. The scar of the operation hurts. It is still that I need medicine to be able to stand it. A nurse tells me that some patients are able to walk again two days after the operation.
Well, unfortunately not me. Though I can walk. But very slowly and just two or three steps at a time. And not without leaning on someone.

Yesterday I got to know A. personally. He is in his mid-fifties and very friendly. He has got a calming disposition. I reckon that he is very experienced. When he and his team are in for the round, it is just him who decides. All others just literally report and answer his questions.

I learned yesterday that I will have a CT scan today. This is to check whether and, if so, where I have metastases of the testicular tumor. The scan will not be done in our building as there are just very few machines available in the whole hospital complex and none in ours.

Andrea arrived early this morning to join me on the CT scan. I am glad that there is another shoulder I can use when it comes to the worst.

The secretary of our ward enters the room and tells me that the walker's transport would arrive soon. I should get dressed and walk down to the ground floor where a car would then wait.
I must have looked quite surprised because she suddenly asks whether I was at all able to walk. I deny and ask her to arrange a wheel chair or similar type of transport. My scar still hurts too much to walk by myself.

About ten minutes later a young working student enters the room pushing a wheel chair. He will drive me to the building where the CT will be done. Andrea joins us. Though it is a sunny day I feel quite chilly when we leave the department of urology and get outside. It takes about 10 minutes until we arrive at the building. It is quite run down. The CT department is in the cellar and we have trouble finding an escalator to get down. It turns out that the CT department is being refurbished. A few working men and a lot of noise from their hammers and demolition machines while we wait.

Although we have an appointment and are on time we have to wait for a long time. There are two patients still to be treated before me.
I get a big beaker with an awfully tasting liquid being the contrast medium. I have to drink another one of it until the examination can start.

After about 90 minutes waiting - another emergency patient has to be scanned as well - I am asked to come into the room with the big tube. Or at least I thought it was a big tube. It turns out to be just a small slide of a tube. So it won't be that difficult. Maybe I have mixed it up with a machine for magnetic resonances.

The assistants and doctors are very nice. They explain everything in detail. I get a temporary catheter laid into the forearm that will be used to inject a special radioactive substance into the veins and the blood stream. This substance tends to accumulate where testicular tumor mass is located in the body. The CT scan itself is just a very sophisticated photo shooting. I have to lay still on a type of horizonal stretcher and the slide of the tube moves over my body and scans it. The whole procedure takes about fifteen to twenty minutes. It doesn't hurt. It's just a funny taste and feeling when the substance is being infused: I taste some metal flavour for a few seconds. And it really gets warm in your veins. I feel the warmth from the arm going down my body into the scrotum. Groovy!

We have to wait outside until the pictures are ready. They aren't developed like in a photo laboratory but they are calculated. It's all digital these days. Billions of bits were generated and have now to be processed to pictures.

After another fifteen minutes the doctor who laid the catheter joins us. Bad news: There are metastases in the abdomen for sure. At least two of about 2-5 cm in diameter. Additionally there is something under the base of the left lung that is suspicious to be cancer. He carefully explains that it's not the worst and not the best outcome of the CT. He will write a report about the findings and send it to the A. as soon as possible. We can go back to the other building.

We don't call the young student. Instead Andrea pushes the wheel chair herself this time.

Metastases! I had feared that I got some and hoped to have none. What does it mean to have them in the lungs?"

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PS: This diary reflects just my very own opinion. - You might be also interested to read further details in doerings.net general section about testicular cancer.