Today's bone scan

I continue to be very glad that I have medical care through Swedish Medical Center's Cherry Hill campus, where every staff person, from the guy pulling the linen crate in the hallway to the infusion nurses and the nuclear medicine tech, greeted me with a smile today.

The scan was a breeze. After getting my port accessed and receiving the radioactive dye injection, the tech told me to take a break, have lunch and come back in two hours. Well, that was at 10 AM so I had more of a second breakfast at Cafe Stellina.

For $11 I enjoyed a fresh roll with sweet butter, a puff pastry tart filled with scrambled eggs, cheese and scallions (cooked to order, with the scallions substituting for pancetta, which I don't eat, it being pork), green salad and a decaf mocha. I was the only patron in the restaurant at that hour but the chef and waiter took excellent care of me. The food was delicious! I will definitely return for breakfast or lunch, since I believe they are only open until 5 PM.

After my yummy second breakfast (the hobbits would have loved it: "What?! No second breakfast?") I returned to the hospital for the actual scan. I set my iPod to shuffle, placed an eye mask over my face, and was tucked into a warm blanket for the hour-long scan. I actually think I fell asleep, because soft snoring kept waking me. If only MRI's were this easy!

I ran into Dr. Goldberg, Seattle's best oncologist, crossing the hospital's main admission area, and he too greeted me warmly and asked why I was in the hospital (for the bone scan he had ordered, but he can't be expected to know my schedule). Dr. G told me on the fly that he spoke with a colleague at UW Medical Center and she recommends he follow the treatment idea I had first brought to his attention -- estrogen followed by aromatase inhibitors. This concept was announced at the recent San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium and appears to be a new spin on an old treatment. To learn more, read this article from Artemis, the e-zine of the Johns Hopkins Breast Centers.

I imagine that after Dr. G receives the bone scan report, and depending on the results of tomorrow's blood test, we may look at a potential change in treatment.