Met with the radiation oncologist this afternoon, after chemo yesterday and  IV Vitamin C and acupuncture this morning.  This week I’ve felt less icky than usual; maybe that extra week off for Thanksgiving really made a difference.

So the radiation oncologist said first of all, he doesn’t think 1 of the 3 spots seen on the 11/20 MRI is actually a tumor, and the other two are–get this–too small to treat without risking missing them (3mm & 4mm).  The reason for this has to do with the precision of the machine’s radiation beams vs. the inescapable movement of the brain as blood pulses through it.  The size of the margins of healthy tissue around each tumor that they zap along with the tumor also comes into play…basically to get 99% treatment response rate, they need a bigger target.

Hah.  It was kind of bizarre to be sitting there with the radiation oncologist listening to him almost laughingly dismiss two cancerous growths inside my brain as “too small.”

So I’ll sit tight until the end of December, get another MRI then, and unless the spots have grown quite rapidly, we’ll schedule the zapping for the end of January, during my week off from chemo.  If they have grown rapidly, we’ll do the zapping in early January.  And I guess if they haven’t grown much at all, we might wait until late February…because they need to be BIGGER.  How weird.

So this is good news–especially the downgrading of one of the spots to probably-not-a-tumor–and I just have to adjust to the Not Having a Solid Plan thing…again…as usual.  I have some births I’m supposed to assist at coming up in the next two months and I hope I get to them ALL.

Note to brain: despite my desire to have a plan and get things over with, I want you to know that I would be very happy to have an MRI in 4 weeks that showed “not enough” growth.  So don’t knock yourselves out in there in the interim.