Ominous sign

I got a worried email from a friend today.  He was wondering why I hadn’t written about the second blood test last week.  This test was supposed to rule out any seriousness of the extraordinarily high liver values a week earlier.  My friend read my silence as an ominous sign and wondered what was going on.

Quite right he is.  I had planned to report back on the day of the test – as I should have.  Many readers of this blog are friends who are deeply concerned about my health and well-being.  You draw your conclusions from a post with potentially bad news, especially if I stay silent for a week and do nothing to relieve your worries.

I am sorry for the silence.  As with my first blog, born in 2006 in Grenoble, I can feel how I’m slowly losing interest.  According to Google Docs, I have written more than 75’000 words.  Sometimes it feels as if I’ve said it all already.  When I sit down to write in moments like this, I get disenchanted quickly.  There just isn’t all that much to write about.  Nothing is happening day to day that I haven’t covered already.  I could have simply reported the results of last week’s test, but then it would have been fit for a tweet, not a blog post.  I had nothing to pad the little fact and turn it into a story, no context or related observations.

I still don’t have anything to go with the test, but at least I’m in the fourth paragraph of this post already.  I went to the hospital shortly after lunchtime, had my port punctured and connected to a piece of tubing and a syringe that the nurse used to draw a few vials of my blood.  This is the serious version of the blood test, not like the half milliliter they take from my finger before each chemo session to get an idea of the levels of my blood cells, and it’s not done every time I’m in the hospital.

The blood was tested in house but not instantaneously.  Theranos remains a fiction.  I sat down in the waiting room to work on my laptop, half an eye always on the clock because of an important meeting later in the afternoon.  After about an hour, the doctor appeared all smiles and asked me into her consultation room.  She looked happy, almost giddy.  My liver values must have caused her a lot of grief.  I could tell that a weight had fallen from her shoulders.

The liver values had been bad.  The doctor’s concern – though she hadn’t told me, waffling on about the side effects of my therapy – was that a tumor had grown large enough in the liver to block a blood vessel and cause the build-up of all sorts of substances.  I suppose this is still a possibility.  The vessel might have found a way around the blockage.  The doctor wasn’t concerned at all.

The blood values were much better than a week earlier.  Most readings, acronyms for the most part, meant nothing to me.  The only term I recognized was bilirubin, a substance synthesized – in my layman’s understanding of human biology – in the gallbladder, an organ I lost in last year’s operation.  What’s important is that most values had dropped quite a bit from the heights that had so frightened my doctor.  Some were almost down to normal.

The doctor didn’t have an explanation for why the values had been abnormally high a week earlier but was confident they’d drop down further within a week.  I’ll find out tomorrow.  Before the chemo session – the last one this year – I’ll have another few vials of blood drawn and tested.  An hour later I should know if things are all right.  Once I do, I’ll share the news with you right away.