Waiting

I was thinking about buying a guitar, but I think I've decided to put that on hold, at least for a little while. I had a routine PET scan done yesterday and I'm waiting to hear the outcome of that before I decide to do anything one way or the other. I have absolutely no reason to believe that I still have cancer, but once you've had it, you can never entirely get it out of your mind. It lingers, like the smell of stale Patchouli and clove cigarette smoke in a 1980s night club.

The point is that I'm waiting. Next week I'll mark Day 100, the official end of the bone marrow transplant program, and I'll transition back to my old oncologist for routine monitoring. That's if the PET scan reveals nothing. If they do find something, well, I don't know what'll happen then. But it probably won't be a lot of fun, whatever it turns out to be.

But one remains confident. Is there such a thing as "guardedly confident?" There's guarded optimism - arms control talks during the Cold War were said to be full of such stuff. But I don't know about guarded confidence. Maybe it's an all-or-nothing thing; you're either confident or you aren't.

So I'm confident. But wary. And so far, no guitar.