Nice waiting rooms count, I’m sure.

So the gynecological oncologist (… think what dreams he must have) said that the biopsy showed that it is a poorly differentiated, aggressive-looking cancer. (I looked it up later: really, poorly differentiated and aggressive are synonyms.) He found another lump in Gwen’s vagina in addition to the one we knew about, and also said that he could feel a mass behind her uterus.

There’ll be a PET scan on Tuesday which is supposed to be able to view the unusual metabolic activity of the cancer cells within Gwen’s body, and tell us where it is. The cancer group will then go into its huddle and come up with a plan of action.

Gwen told the oncologist that she has never wanted kids, so do what you need, take what you need, etc. The doctor said that that was good and made planning easier; he also said that any course of action they took would likely leave her infertile in any case.

The oncology outfit is very good at being reassuring, and they have a very nice waiting room, too. They’re working with us on finances, they say.

Gwen got some nice pain drugs for the discomfort. Otherwise she is easily tired – the other indicator of late. She can get about halfway through a shopping excursion without having to sit down. On a trip to Target the other day with her mom, she tried a wheelchair.

Gwen is meanwhile starting her next class on her computer. I am at loose ends for a bit, and a little stir-crazy with it – oversocialized with too much public time with her mom, too. The summer is all wrong.

If you notice a blunted tone in this entry, as if Flugendorf is deliberately not going into long analytical sentences and is not looking too far ahead at all, you’re not off.

In the meantime, the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act. A morning surprise. A nice one for Gwen and me. Gwen’s mom is less sanguine about such things. She mentioned – I believe in reference to government health care matters in general – that Canadians were coming into Minnesota, and also coming into the U.S. to use the Mayo Clinic and so on, because of long waiting times in Canada. I’ve heard and read similar, and that waiting times are indeed an issue. (I’ve also read other Canadians who said the wait times were not so bad. I don’t know. I can also imagine other reasons why people who can afford it would like to go to the Mayo Clinic.) What I should have said – and it was on the tip of my tongue, because my doctor had said it – is that it’s easy to shorten waiting periods if you leave a lot of people out of the line. I held my tongue. I don’t want to have an argument about that. What I do want is obscure. With one great big exception.