The year started out a bit rough. I was feeling quite a bit better than a month before, but I still tired very easily and couldn't eat more than a bite of food a couple times a day. And then I took a fall and banged up both my shins. The bruising seemed pretty deep, and later in the spring, during my quarterly PET scan, a hot spot showed up on the left tibia. I could feel a bump about the size of a quarter under my skin. This set off another round of biopsies.
As usual, it started with simple needle aspiration, and the pathologist immediately examined a small sample during the procedure. He said there were some suspect cells (lymphocyte) but that they were 'scarce'. The sample was sent to a lab for analysis and came back inconclusive, as so often happens when attempting to diagnose lymphoma. A second sample was then sent for a more elaborate test, and the results also came back ambiguous. Finally, about two months after all this began, in the early summer, I was sent for an out-patient surgical biopsy to remove the tissue and send the whole sample in for analysis. Two weeks later my Oncologist told me that they'd concluded it was a false positive - no conclusive signs of lymphoma restaging. Whew.
This is one of the hardest things about going through a procedure like this. There is a very precarious time when a patient is likely to see restaging, and that lasts for a long time. As every scheduled test approaches, or with each ache and pain, you tend to imagine the worst. It's emotionally draining, and I was in a bad mood - a lot. This was the second biopsy I'd had in the months since the transplant, so of course I kept expecting the worst. And I did experience a lot of aches in my arms and legs, and periodically felt lumps that seemed suspicious, but they continued to be ruled negative. No one really knows what they are, but again we sort of assume the nodules are residual masses - perhaps now shrunk down to scar tissue. Little things like that always keep the process in the back of your mind.
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