I just got back from spending a couple of hours at my new second home, the doctor’s office. During that time I was poked, prodded, and tested some more, and they’re still not sure what’s wrong with me.

So why did I file this under good news?

Because, despite some odd “chest nodules” showing up on my CT scan, my lymph nodes are fine. That means that, despite having fevers, night sweats, fatigue, itching, losing a few pounds, a history of mono and measles, and basically every other f#*king B symptom imaginable, I do not have Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.

You have no idea how good that makes me feel. Well, maybe you do. But ever since I started checking into my symptoms, and wondering why my doctor was scheduling me for a chest/abs/pelvis CT scan, well, I’ve been pretty scared. I understand why she didn’t say, “Oh, and you might have cancer, but you probably don’t,” before doing the test — no sense getting worked up over something that only hits a few thousand people a year — but this is the age of the internet and I wasn’t doing myself any favors and looked it up anyway.

The last couple of days have been pretty tense. Getting the good news back was … relieving. Like a new lease on life, seriously. Who cares that I’m still running a fever, and that walking up a flight of stairs a couple of times gets me tired. Whatever it is, its not going to be a huge deal. Relatively speaking.

Which brings me to my latest round of tests - again, trying to rule things out more than anything else. I had a TB test, both because of similar symptoms and those odd “chest nodules” I mentioned earlier. And I had my first (and quite possibly only) ultrasound: a friendly technician measured my heart and flatly refused to comment on anything that she saw, apparently because then she’d be diagnosing which is illegal because she’s not a cardiologist. So I’ll find out more about both of those on Monday, I guess.

Until then, I’m continuing to rest, take things easy, and “enjoy” weird weakness and fever sensations throughout the day. The good news is that despite cutting about 6,000 calories (almost 2 pounds) of exercise out of my week, and not cutting my intake back by much, I’m burning up enough that my metabolism is racing. This morning I weighed in at 168, the lowest I’ve been in a while. So that’s something, at least.

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