Friday, June 7, 2013

8 Week Post Treatment Check-up

Wednesday I had my 8 week post-radiation PET scan and bloodwork. Today was my check-up with the medical oncologist.

I got news I wasn't anticipating. A spot show up on my PET scan. It was not there at my last scan (after chemo, but before radiation), but it is there now. It's about 1 cm and is located in the same spot as the original mass. My doctor did not seem confident that this spot was not cancerous. He said that if it hadn't shown up so brightly on the scan, he would have blown it off as inflammation/infection, but he is very concerned about it.

So, right now the game plan is a needle biopsy next week (scheduled for Wednesday, June 12). There are only two Interventional Radiologists in Richmond that my oncologist likes for the job, so I took the first available appointment with one of them.

If the biopsy comes back positive, we move to a new, stronger chemotherapy. If it comes back negative, we move to an excisional biopsy, because in the doctor's words, "I won't trust a needle biopsy if it comes back negative." They will attempt to remove as much of the lymph node as possible to biopsy it. Given the location of the node, removal is still iffy though.

We didn't talk about many details right now. We talked briefly about chemotherapy requiring hospitalization and a bone marrow transplant, but we decided to hold off on all that until after next week's biopsy.

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