Gulp!

Tomorrow I go in for a bone marrow biopsy and (I think) a PET scan. I thought I'd be better able to deal with it, but I find being on the precipice of finding out if I still have cancer or not fricking terrifying.

I don't think I actually have cancer any more, and all the indicators are good. But it's still scary. What happens if I still have cancer? It's too awful to contemplate, but it haunts me like the plot of a bad sci-fi movie (say, Event Horizon, one of my guilty pleasures).

The procedures are themselves nothing to sweat. The PET scan in particular is pretty restful, since they don't want you to move around and are just as happy if you nod off for a while. It's even fun to lie there and think about what's going on in one's body (I'm not sure, but I think the radioactive flourine in the tagged glucose undergoes beta decay, releasing a positron and a neutrino as a neutron turns into a proton. The positron presently collides with a regular old electron, and the two anti-particles annihilate one another and produce a pair of 511 KeV gamma rays moving in opposite directions, which readily pass through one's flesh and are picked up by the detectors - and people say that nuclear engineering is boring! The neutrino proceeds out on its own, but interacts so weakly with normal matter it could probably pass through the entire Earth without even noticing).

But never mind. Tomorrow is when the rubber meets the road, when six months of chemotherapy either pay off or are revealed as a cruel hoax.

I'm cold and scared.