Tomorrow is my scan day, and I will get the results next week. Hopefully I will be able to reassure myself that all is fine and there's nothing horrible lurking inside me. Unfortunately I found a pea-sized lump in front of my ear recently and it was examined by a plastic surgeon consultant this morning, one I've never seen before. He is certain it's nothing to worry about, that it's just an enlarged lymph node, but he is going to order an ultrasound to be on the safe side. He thought it wasn't "justified" to extend the CT to include my neck and head.
Two things he said irritated me. The first was that only a small minority of people get distant metastases so I shouldn't worry. Er, isn't that WHAT we worry about? Show me someone with late stage 3 cancer who WOULDN'T worry if a hard lump appeared on their face. I know that it's a minority of people who become stage 4, but it's also the minority who get melanoma in the first place, then far fewer who have spread to lymph nodes and then even fewer still who get mets after a lymph node dissection. I've been in all three of those minorities so of course I am going to worry. I know what he meant but the way he phrased it made me feel ike I was being a nuisance.
The second thing he said was that it was very small so it was unlikely to be a met. Unless I'm dreadful at science, all mets (and indeed tumours) start out the size of one cell. So something pea-sized is surely quite substantial?
My qualm is with the fact that he will deal with cancer patients day in and day out. Surely he will have some idea of the state of mind and the level of worry that they endure. There are ways of phrasing things sensitively and I don't feel he did that. He made me feel like I was silly, and that I was worrying unduly. Hopefully it is just a node like he believes but I think it's best to check it out and that should happen without being made to feel like a hypochondriac.
God, I sound like a right cow now. Sorry.
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