Bye

After waiting for nearly two months, I finally got scheduled for a new PET scan today - to see how the cancer is developing and how the hormonal therapy isn't working. And I was lucky - I was assigned this slot because some other patient had dropped out for some reason.

Before the actual scan I had to fill a bunch of stupid forms, pay a stupid fee of 55 euros for "administrative services" (the actual procedure costs several thousands but is paid by the health insurance), and undergo a "consultation" with a doctor who examined all my documentation.

The doctor started with the usual bullshit aimed at reasussing patients in my condition. "Prostate cancer is treatable", "the medicine has advanced tremendously these days", "there's a bunch of top-level specialists behind your case", yada-yada.

"Doctor," I told him, "I have a stage-4 oligometastatic aggressive cancer, with metastases in bones and lymph nodes. The Gleason score is 8. It is likely to be resistant to hormonal therapy, because even before the therapy my testosterone level was abnormally low yet the cancer was developing just fine. The probability for a patient in my condition to still be alive 5 years after diagnosis is only 30% - and that's the optimistic prognosis." The doctor shut up immediately. Yes, I know - I read too much.

While examining the documentation from the previous PET scan, he noticed the part about the presence of a metastasis in the rib being inconclusive. "What is this bullshit?!," he asked. Well, that's what I was told. At the time, the urologist asked for a second reading but I never heard from them again, so I guess it wasn't any more conclusive than the previous one. "OK," said the doc, "it will become clear when we compare the images from the new scan to those of the old one." (I brought him those images on a CD; I was warned to do so in advance.)

While we're chatting, I mention, among other things, that my employer has seen fit to reduce my salary to zero. "How so?!," exclaims the doc in disbelief. "Oh, it has nothing to do with the cancer," I start explaining. "You see, I work for the Academy of Sciences and...". "Ah, everything's clear then," interrupts me the doc and we leave it at that. If I have to guess, I'd say that the Academy does not enjoy a very high esteem within the private sector...

While I was waiting for my turn to use the machine, I overheard two young doctors talking. One of them was telling the other how he had uploaded a scan image to an AI (probably a privacy violation by itself) and asked the AI (he didn't specify which one) to analyze it. The AI flaged a bunch of "metastases" on the image - like, a dozen of them - most of which were obvious bullshit. "So," said the doc, "I kept telling it 'remove this', 'remove that' - and it did! I played with it a whole afternoon but at the end it produced a pretty clear image." All I could think was "Uh-oh! If the doctors have started delegating life-and-death decisions to stupid and hallucinating chatbots, we're all screwed..."

The procedure went relatively smoothly and without any major surprises, given that I was familiar with it, having undergone it once already in another hospital. It took 3 hours, most of which was spent waiting. One surprising difference was that the previous time (in the other hospital), the nurse administered the radioactive solution by hand and quickly hid in her bunker while I was waiting for my turn to be scanned. Here, the solution was administered by a machine and the nurses (there were several of them) kept milling around nonchalantly.

I asked one of them if she wasn't afraid of the radiation. After all, I again received a leaflet, sternly warning me not to be around other people (and especially pregnant women and small children) for 24 hours after the procedure. While the amount of radiation a single patient gets during the procedure is probably negligible (the chance of getting cancer from it is only 1 in 20,000 - and I already have cancer, so who cares) but the nurse being around people like me the whole day, day after day, probably presents a non-negligible threat to her - and she wasn't even wearing a dosimeter. She just shrugged. Oh, well, young people tend to think that they are immortal.

The results will become available on Tuesday, March 10. Let's see how it goes.