Gearing up for round two ...

... in the never-ending fight against Tumor World Dominance.

It's weird to be ill. I'm loathe to say "seriously ill." Just because of all the types of tumors to get, I have a rare one, a barely understood one, a fringe cancer if you will.

And like many things that are bad for you, it's producing little in the way of primary symptoms.

Maybe my GI tract is a little more stressed than it should be. I do fatigue easily. But both things have been true for years.

So, this week, I go in for the complete GI tract scope, the full Monty. A colonoscopy and an endoscopy. Only Nina Hartley's ass gets more attention than mine.

After that, they should get a visual on this pernicious little creature, the tumor only revealed by the stealth octreotide scan. Which produced a shadow image, somewhere in GI tract, or maybe my kidney, or ... well, it's down there somewhere. Hiding out, not paying taxes, not reflecting on the social issues of the day. Just producing serotonin and chilling.

Did it metastasize to my lung? Or visa versa? No one is telling. The theory is that these are most common in the GI tract, therefore it probably started there. And so the one in my lung - God rest its tumorous soul - was the splinter tumor. Are there any more?

So the marker - aside from the CAT scan - that discovered all this was my bloodwork. I test positive for pertussis and Rheumatoid Factors. And not just a little. Like Billy Joel lately, I'm off the charts.

So the markers indicated that my immune system was churning out a protein responsive, usually, to RA and pertussis. Yet, being symptom free, the thinking is now that carcinoid tumors were playing ding dong ditch and shifting blame to those other diseases. Quite clever.

When they removed my first tumor [Ah, those were the days!], they expected that that would be the end of it. That my blood work would go back to normal. But no.

The markers did decrease. By about half. Leaving me still crazy high [normal RA factors are 30, mine were - pre-surgery, about 4,000, post-surgery, about 2.000. You do the math.

So I'm gearing up to be poked, prodded, sliced, diced, drugged, mugged and processed like a Honeybaked ham.

As long as they keep me in Versed and Diloted, we will be able to get through this.