Thursday, January 4, 2018, I had a positive MRI! That's the sound byte. If you take anything from my retelling it's that: Thursday I had an MRI and that MRI looked good.
Yesterday, Monday, January 8, we met with my neuro-oncologist and and he showed us the images, the Magnetic Resonance Images, that look like X-Rays of my brain. The images look almost exactly the same as the last images from November. There is still one highlighted dot. It hasn't changed which increases the likelihood that it's scar tissue or some other inactive tumor tissue.
But there in lies the rub. The hard truth to the image is that while it's very good that things essentially look the same, "the same" entails a small bit of undefined tissue in my head that at the very, very best was formerly cancerous. ALSO, I had been completely visibly cancer free for about 5 years, from 2011 to 2016. Then, in the absence of any indication, a new brain tumor grew in the old site. The result was the most recent treatments, including this recent MRI. So I partially underwent this MRI because of cancer's uncertainty.
In addition to the uncertainty the images provide, I also physically felt uncertain. Thursday morning I had an MRI. My Dr. viewed the results and relayed the good news later that day. Saturday I didn't feel well. My stomach felt uneasy which led directly to me feeling uneasy. Monday I felt fine. Did I feel weird on Saturday because the cancerous tissue inside my head began to grow AGAIN? Or, did I feel weird because I felt weird and sometimes people feel weird? It's uncertain.
All I can do is know that anything I experienced negatively in the few months leading up to my last MRI did not ultimately result in a negative. I can apply that knowledge to any weird feeling now. But there's no ignoring the fact that I unexpectedly produced a tumor in 2016. That constant tension leads to constant uncertainty. Any image provides a small amount of sureness that things looked good at that one moment in time. But it does not completely erase the past or my recollection of it.
So yes, my latest MRI looked good. Things hadn't really changed. For the next MRI I will have the knowledge that in terms of my cancer nothing was bad leading up to this last MRI. But, because I experience a constant reality of brain cancer there isn't the same space to exhale and breathe personally as there might be when reading a periodic update from a distance. Unfortunately the news doesn't help alleviate the uncertainty going forward, but fortunately there's a forward to go. Keep going that way!