Positivity and pessimism

In my earlier middle age I did a few arts courses at the Open University. This led to a degree of familiarity (no degree, alas, but that is a completely different story) with the dark arts of close textual analysis. I hesitate to try to define this technique for fear that some may read this who actually know what I am talking about, but I take it to mean the microscopic examination of words and combinations of words to try to divine the author's meaning or to prove a pet theory of the student or some combination of the above. 

This technique slipped unbidden into my mind after a nurse practitioner at Ninewells used the word "stable".

Now this wasn't as you might imagine a conversation about horses and their housing. 

A lovely, sympathetic nurse practitioner in the chemo day unit had noticed that the gap between my last CT scan and it's interpretation with my oncologist was much longer than usual (6 weeks). She took pity on my state of doubt and ran through a rough summary of the results. 

Her summary was positive as she was able to confirm that all the lung tumours were still shrinking and that the larger brain tumour was stable.

This was the moment when my memory of close textual analysis twitched into action.

Certainly stable is not overtly threatening but a large tumour which has been shrinking but is now stable has stopped shrinking and might still be a problem.

Before I spread alarm and despondency I should jump a couple of weeks to that long awaited meeting with Dr Lord, the consultant oncologist.

As usual we looked at 2 sets of scans.

The lung, which at the end of last year resembled the Indonesian archipelago now resembles (and here my quest for geographical analogy stumbles. A group of much smaller and fewer islands?).

And as for that worrisome brain tumour? 

It turns out that "stable" in this instance means so small as to be hard to locate precisely. More calcified remnant than active tumour.

The side effects too are minimal at the moment, and I came away from that oncology meeting with the interesting news that longer eyelashes might also be a side effect of the glorious Afatinib. I don't know the practical implications of this yet. 

So the news really couldn't be much better, so good in fact that, while out delivering eggs last week, I twice (I hope only twice) announced myself as "back from the dead". Tasteless I know and rather premature but a symptom of how I am feeling at the moment.

Throughout this novel experience I have balanced my natural pessimism (which means only that I prefer nice surprises to unpleasant ones) with a consistent positivity and determination that I will keep my sense of humour as long as humanly possible.

As someone quite famous once said: this is not the end, nor even the beginning of the end, but it may be the end of the beginning. Hope has fledged although expectation is some way off.