Tuesday, June 21, 2005

The Big C

Cha is more confident over her ambiguous pap results because everyone she's spoken to about them has either had a scare herself or knows others who've had scares; these scares have either been false positives or been easily treatable positive [negative?] results. I dunno about you but I'll gladly take a thick male finger in my ass once a year over what our wives have to put up with routinely.

Of course she mentioned her ambiguous pap to her friend Shan last night and Shan dropped a bomb on her, said bomb being a 4cm tumor on an ovary, and 12 weeks ago it was a 2cm tumor. Shan's doctors thought it would diminish if they put her on a certain birth control pill for six weeks. Instead, it grew. Then they decided to wait an additional 6 weeks. Now Shan's got a tumor twice the size it was and swollen lymph nodes in her neck, armpits, and abdomen, so she's getting a biopsy this week.

I don't understand the waiting game. Seems to me that if an MRI shows a 2cm tumor on an ovary, the doctors should be getting a piece of that sucker right away to check it out. Waiting makes absolutely no sense, given the propensity of malignant growths to drop seeds into the bloodstream and lymph system.