I had a follow-up visit with my oncologist on January 28th. I was sitting in the clinic exam room for 15 minutes and was starting to doze off when he burst through the door without knocking, nearly scaring me shitless. The first words out of his mouth were, "Good news! No cancer! In fact, the lung nodule that the Hudson ER doctor saw on your chest CT on January 27th is gone. No idea what it was." I replied, "I figured the PET scan was negative. I got a CD of it and viewed it at home. Not even a dot of yellow from a pissed-off lymph node! Does this point toward a fungal thing, like histoplasmosis?" He said, "The PET scan would have picked up on that, too, but there's nothing there. Your lungs are perfectly healthy." He said I needed to follow-up with my nurse practitioner soon to plan future follow-ups regarding this humbling incident. "You don't need to come back to see me in the future," he said.
So, yesterday, I visited my nurse practitioner. She says I'm one of her favorite patients because I always come in with a self-diagnosis and acceptable treatment plan. Yesterday was no different. I suggested no further follow ups regarding my cancer scare. "Maybe another chest CT if signs and symptoms recur," I said, to which she agreed. She listened to my lungs and said they were perfectly clear. After listening to my heart, she, as expected, commented on the presence of a minor functional heart murmur (which I've had since 1993).
Now, if I can just get the swelling in my lower legs to go down and get rid of my mild shortness of breath upon exertion. Too much salt-laden ham on Christmas and too much leftover ham on the following days. A touch of congestive heart failure, I suspect. I'll just double up on my Bumex diuretic pills until the symptoms are gone... and stop eating the leftover ham.
Commercial aircraft flown in: B712 B722 B732 B734 B737 B738 B741 B742 B744 B752 B753 B762 B772 A310 A318 A319 A320 A321 DC91 DC93 DC94 DC1030 DC1040 F100 MD82 MD83 A223 CR2 CR7 E175