This year my annual ultrasound/mammogram came back with a "suspicious" lymph node in my neck. Just in time to make my birthday one of suspense, and not in a good way. So the week after my birthday I was back in hospital having CT scans, bone scans, and when neither of these were conclusive, a biopsy.
The ultrasound-guided biopsy was quite amusing, in its own way. The radiologist and ultrasonographer were murmuring quietly to each other for a while, moving the probe around and murmuring some more. Finally, they decided to share, and the radiologist (that's the doctor with a big needle in his hand) turns to me and says "I don't feel very comfortable about this."
My first thought was "You're not comfortable? You're not the one on the sharp end of the biopsy needle!"
My second thought was "If you're not feeling absolutely 100% tip-top confident you know what you are doing, then I don't want you sticking the needle in either!"
In the end, the radiologist and I agreed that a core biopsy was not going to work. There are too many big, important structures in the neck for either of us to want a needle on a spring being shot in there, even under ultrasound guidance.
So I ended up going for a surgical biopsy of my neck under a general anaesthetic, with the hope that the "suspicious" lymph node would be removed and sent to the lab, and whether it turned out to be cancer or not, it would be out of my neck at least!
I woke up to the surgeon saying, "I hope you aren't disappointed."
Because waking up to hear that the cancer is back, has broken out of the lymph node and is now wrapped inoperably around the arteries in my neck - surely that's the definition of disappointing!
I am now off to the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre to find out if there are any clinical trials open which might be suitable for me - it's medical experiments for me! I'm having a PET scan first, which is one of the radioactive ones, so by this time next week I will be a glow-in-the-dark guinea pig. I'll let you know if I develop any superpowers!
