About three months ago, my wife started her cancer treatments.

She’s had three rounds of chemo, and she’s hit the midpoint of the about six-month cycle. (It’s an “about” because they’re very specific, 28 days between treatments, so it’s not an exact “month” but basically works out around that.)

After your third round of treatments, you get a follow-up PET scan to see how things are going.

My wife had been surprisingly unconcerned about the first PET scan. At that point, the CT scan had shown us pretty clearly that it was lymphoma and had spread; we basically just needed specifics about how big and how bad it looked before she could start treatment.

This one, she was sweating. At its heart, chemotherapy is medically rationed suffering; nobody wants to think they’ve undergone that struggle for no reason.

As such, she aimed to keep expectations low: “I’ll be happy so long as it isn’t spreading,” she said a few times.

I knew that was, to put it politely, hogwash. But she’s easily discouraged and I wasn’t going to raise the bar, even if I had a slightly sunnier outlook about what I anticipated from the testing.

Though she’s been mostly good about not consulting Dr. Google during the process, she did some reading about other people with her type of cancer and the mid-point scan. The general gist was that most people see some improvement, but even if you don’t, it a) doesn’t mean the treatment isn’t working and b) there are many other treatment options.

And so, on a chilly Thursday morning, I dropped her off at the opposite side of where she gets chemo every month to get a new scan.

The testing is relatively short. They inject a radioactive dye and basically a sugared-up saline solution — she was told to stay 6 feet away from our son for the rest of the day — let you sit for a while to get it into your system and then do the imaging. Cancer loves the sugar; what the scan measures is how much sugar the cancer is sucking up from your body, called “uptake.”

It was done in just a bit over an hour. Then came the hard part: Waiting.

When she got the first PET scan in August, it was a short wait. We had the scans in hand later in the day. But this was a different radiology site, doctor and patient portal.

This time around, we weren’t sure when we were going to see or hear anything. She checked the patient portal a few times, nothing. We knew her doctor was out of the office on Friday, so we joked that it would be Monday.

We hadn’t heard anything by 5 p.m. and presumed it wasn’t coming. But then, just before 7, my wife shouted my name from the bedroom while I was cleaning up the kitchen.

Her doctor had emailed her.

It wasn’t good news. It was spectacular news.

Her lymphatic system was lit up like a Christmas tree in the first scan, from pelvis to neck. Her doctor said this time around, there was almost no uptake above her stomach. Her pelvis, which is where they’d seen the most swelling and most uptake on the first test, showed far less uptake this time around. On the 1-5 scale, she’d been 4s and 5s with her lymphatic nodes around her hips. This time, she was right around the 2-3 line, and 2 is not considered cancerous under normal circumstances.

It rocketed past even my optimistic projection. We hugged and cried, despite the radiation warnings. We told our son, who jumped up and down. (We even told our cats. They did not appear to care.)

We see her doctor again next week and we’ll see where we go from here. She still most likely has to finish the final three rounds of chemo, and lymphoma is a chronic condition, so even if she were to achieve full remission, she’ll always have to be watching for this in the future.

But after months of watching and worrying, this was a golden moment of all golden moments.

Thanks for reading, y’all!