One Step Closer

Tomorrow are Austin’s one-year scans. He’ll have his usual procedures: labs drawn, followed by an abdominal ultrasound to look at the liver and kidney, followed by a chest CT, followed by a visit with his oncology team. And we’ll follow our regular schedule: a normal morning at school, then lunch at the fountain outside the hospital, then many hours of roaming back and forth through the underground maze from one appointment to another.

The radiologist usually gives me a basic rundown on his findings during the ultrasound, so that information I’ll have before we even walk out the door. The CT scan takes longer to read (or longer to be read, is more like it), so we might not have official results from that until Friday. Some of the labs are quick and we’ll have those back by the time we return to the cancer center after scans, but the kidney numbers — which we await with bated breath — won’t come until after we’ve gone home.

Of course, we hope for no changes to his liver, kidney or lungs and either an improvement or maintenance in terms of kidney function. We feel good, hopeful, optimistic, but we’ve always felt that way, even when we were way off base. He seems so normal and vibrant — but he’s always seemed that way, on the outside at least, even when things were going horribly wrong on the inside.

So, we take this one step at a time. And potentially, hopefully, as tomorrow comes to a close, we will find ourselves one step closer to an end. Not the end, because that will never come. But an end. Which would be good enough.