I really dropped you in it didn’t I?  Sorry, I didn’t mean to. The last week in between tests, consultations and flying to NZ didn’t leave much room for any more than texting results to the ‘tight five’ and jumping on a plane. I’m now in the motherland, staying with friends and family and generally keeping things normal.

And, they are, well, not normal, but not alarming.  Let me give you the low down (seeing as Kelley asked).

Monday morning started innocuously enough, I’d been getting somewhat more alarmed during the weekend trying to mentally prepare for the CT scans and Nuc Med bone scans booked for that morning. I’d expected not to take too long, and had planned to spend the rest of the day working as usual.  This wasn’t to be, simply because once the scans were done I was asked to come back later in the day for a full body scan.

It was pretty much at that point that my brain started into overdrive… WTF? I hadn’t been mentally prepared for this, and my brain went into overdrive as to why they felt the need… all I could think was that they’d seen something that warranted further action.

You really can’t tell your brain at that point that if there was abdominal involvement it would have shown up on the ultrasounds… and it was even harder to have an internal voice of reason when the story across the Tasman had taken a turn for the more serious.  So I called up the Tailor who came over and kept me sane for a couple of hours before I had to go back to be scanned from top to toe.

That scan duly done I went upstairs to the [breast] surgeon’s rooms to collect my referral to the orthopaedic surgeon and went home to call him for an appointment. I was desperately hoping that he was free to see me before I was due to fly to NZ on the Thursday… and thankfully had a slot on Wednesday.  So the awkward in between continued, with something more of a disconcerting edge, until then.

I googled the surgeon… one of his specialities is musculoskeletal tumours… did I say disconcerting? I meant downright terrifying.

My lovely neighbour, offered to keep me company at the surgeon’s, company and moral support, and her son’s mother offered to drive, so it was Dee and the senior citz off to visit the surgeon. But we duly arrived, filled in all the requisite paper work and waited our turn.  As with all the other appointments I’ve had in the last 3 weeks, this one was also on time, quick, and ridiculously expensive…

The surgeon duly read through all the scans and finally pulled out the two relevant to his interests and asked me two things.  “Does it hurt?” (a consistent question throughout the whole affair to which the answer was always no) and “What have they already told you?”.

Based on the fact this thing in my arm has never caused me pain, and on his experience with looking at such things, the short story is that he was confident that he was looking at an enchondroma – I’ve googled them, they don’t sound serious, and as mine is asymptomatic I’m not expecting things to get any more interesting. The surgeon was pretty low key about it, seemed a little bothered at the extent to which my case had been esclatated… but as he wanted to set my mind at ease he is going to schedule an MRI and a bone biopsy to rule out anything dastardly.

We’ll deal with that in January.

In the meantime, I’m back in NZ, Lil’ Sis, is having a lymph node biopsy on Friday, and we’re all crossing everything that it proves negative, given that she went from  low grade, contained (in the duct) cancer to invasive carcinoma in one fell swoop during her biopsy, we’re on elevated alert. (Though at this stage she’s not considered to have life threatening disease… phew).

Thanks to all of you who’ve been checking in, sorry to leave this update so late… when it was all happening I had no brain space to blog, and now that it’s mostly all over I didn’t have any need to vent it out… for now, all is well.  I’ll let you know if that changes, and if I get gnarly scans, I’ll show you my ‘inside out’ pix in the New Year.

I know I’m one of probably 80%* of people who have been blogging as long as I have who have run out of ‘blogging steam’ in the last couple of years. It’s easy to do, a blog about your personal life, a life that has settled into some kind of mundane normality, isn’t one that provides much fodder for reflection or much interest for those who may have been reading.  You know, at least as long as all you’re doing is getting up, going to work, eating socialising and so on.

Frankly, I could have been blogging about my Melbourne adventures, but those have mainly revolved around trying new restaurants, drinking new and ever fancier local beers. Furthermore, I  have never wanted this blog to turn into that Christmas letter you see ever year. You know the one, you’ve probably got one on your mantlepiece as we speak, one that rattles off all of the year’s achievements, and sometimes the ups and downs, but mostly which serves to be a ‘on-paper’ Facebook wrap up that shows off the bits of our life that makes us look more interesting than we are.

This makes me think that for some writing a personal blog and reading everyone else’s, at least in this quarter, has run out of steam because we’re only so interesting as we are different from those around us, and as the similarities become more obvious the longer we blog… I don’t know.. I’m spitballing here… just writing until I’m ready to write what I’m actually supposed to write about.

So, about that…

In reference to the title… I had a moment recently when I’d kind of wished that my life hadn’t settled so quickly back into normality even in my new surroundings; I kind of hoped that I had more fodder to write about… and well, here we are after a visit to the surgeon with just that.

More to write about.

Don’t panic.

I’m not panicking, so frankly I don’t you need panicking either. I really only know a little more now than I did before my appointment. That really only amounts to having seen the x-ray and had pointed out the area on those films which has raised these questions.  I do know that the point of curiosity on the x-ray is a 2.,5cm long lytic lesion (go ahead, look it up, but I don’t want you to tell me what you find, thanks) that’s sitting at the top of my right humerus just below the shoulder joint.

The surgeon has said “It could be a tumor”, and the fact that the edges aren’t strictly smooth makes them want to look at it further.  So, yep, I’m still in limbo, still in that ‘awkward in between’ until I have a bone scan and CT scan next week (Monday).

So yeah, stick around, I’ll give you an update then.

*made up number