It's Thursday, Feb. 15th, and Michelle, the nurse
practitioner with the 19 tattoos, is bubbling with blonde good cheer as she
arrives in the examining room in the Urology Department at what recently has
been renamed Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center.
She has the results
from my visit two days earlier. The blood work that had to be redone because
the first sample wouldn't test. The chest X-ray. The CT scan.
"Would
you be this cheerful if you had bad news?" my health care proxy, Bill
Finkelstein, asks.
Actually,
yes, she says. But this news is good. All the blood indicators are well within
their limits. Nothing showed up in the scans.
Dr.
Guru, the man who did the surgery and saved my life back in 2015, steps in a few
minutes later and he's beaming, too, as he shakes our hands. Everything is fine.
I have a couple
questions. One of them is: "See you in six months?" No, he says. It
can be a year now. I'm simultaneously relieved and, well, a little disappointed. I've
grown accustomed to getting reassurance every six months. Then again, hey, it's
a year! I'll take it.
