Since last fall, I’ve been on an every three months regime of getting scanned. Two have been chest and abdomen, other was just my lungs. They are tracking the speed of spots in my lungs, looking for anything to get bigger. The last scan, done at the end of June, showed my largest lesion at about 2cm diameter, and growing a couple mm every 3 months. It showed the other ones “unchanged.” This is too slow to be alarming, but they want to track it, along with a tumor marker in my blood.

One possibility is that they will shoot a beam of radiation at the big lesion if it’s growing faster than everything else. Another is that they’ll do nothing until they see a rapid increase in the pace of growth.

What all this means is that I’ve gone into a kind of cycle: the best parts of the year are between the time my doctor finishing the appointment where he says “we’ll do another scan in 3 months” and getting the scan in three months. Then there’s the waiting part in-between, which is less fun.