This is the day of my first meeting with the surgeon who will be performing my biopsy, and I have to say, I feel much better after my meeting with him.

He starts with a physical examination--the typical poking an prodding, feeling my lymph nodes, and the question I've already become quite familiar with answering: "Now why did you go in for a CT scan?"

I understand why medical professionals are asking this. After all, the CT scan is showing some swollen lymph nodes, which gives an indication that it's lymphoma, so someone had to expect lymphoma. I had to be having symptoms. I had to have some elevated blood counts or something. Otherwise, I wouldn't have had the CT scan.

Or so the thinking goes.

In truth, I had the CT scan because my doctor wanted to look at my liver. I've had slightly elevated liver enzymes, and he just wanted to make sure the liver looked fine, so he ordered a CT scan. I finally managed to get around to following up on the CT scan, because it was time for me to head back in for my annual physical, so I needed to finish my to-do list before the physical. I've said it before: Tony time runs a bit behind regular time.

So no, no one has ever suspected anything about my lymph nodes. It's my liver who was supposed to be star of the show. And wouldn't you know it? My latest blood panels show perfectly normal liver functions now. Had I wandered back into my doctor's office for my annual physical without following up on the CT scan from the previous year, he may have done blood tests, found normal liver readings, and said, "Well, let's not worry about a CT scan after all." Which is a scary thought I'd prefer to not even contemplate.

Let's just say I ended up having a CT scan at this very time because I was supposed to have a CT scan at this very time. I attribute it to God. You attribute it to luck, if you prefer, but I'm going with God.

Anyway, back to the surgeon. I like him. I like him a lot. He's a close family friend of a woman who used to work for our ad agency, so I make sure to drop her name (a little personal contact never hurts). He pulls out the CT scans and goes over them with me at the computer. He points out my liver looks great (of course), and my spleen is normal size--with advanced lymphoma, the spleen often swells. He shows me the enlarged lymph nodes, and I'm a bit surprised to see it's not just one or two. It's more like a dozen. The largest, he points out, is 3.2 centimeters; two others are between 2 and 3 centimeters. The others are just large enough to be picked up on CT scan; anything above 1 cm or so is considered abnormal, mostly because anything less than that won't be picked up on the CT scan. Normally, a CT scan shouldn't be able to pick up any lymph nodes at all.

"Now," the surgeon says, "you may just have swollen lymph nodes here for some unexplained reason. I pulled lymph nodes out of a guy a few weeks ago, and it ended up not being lymphoma. Happens a lot of the time. Just because they're swollen doesn't automatically make them lymphoma."

Ah, now here's a doctor that's hip to my groove. He's on the not-lymphoma wavelength I've been researching so much these last few days. I like him even more.

"We've scheduled you for your biopsy on Thursday morning. We'll take out one of these nodes, and they'll go to the pathology lab. Call me at 11:00 am next Monday morning, and we should have an idea of what this might be."

Okay. Well, next Monday morning is six days away. A long time to wait without knowing, yes, but I can see how my medical team has shifted into high gear to get me a biopsy, and to get me tested. That's probably about as fast as I can expect this whole thing to happen. Six more days isn't so long to wait.

I'll wait considerably longer than six days, of course. But I don't know that yet.