Mike's stuff » cancer

Pet scan #8

mike — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 12:08:58 +0000

I’ve become such a bad blogger: months between updates, and forgetting to mention things like my semi-annual PET scans. After all, cancer is what prompted me to start this blog in the first place, almost exactly three years ago!

Well, in August I had my scan, and as usual, everything turned out fine. Next scan in January. Happy to say that the last two and a half years have probably been my healthiest of the last 20!

PET Scan #7

mike — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 14:46:22 +0000

Went for PET scan #7 last week, and my doctor this week said it was completely clean, as expected. I’m now switching to twice a year for future scans. It was a little over two years ago that I had my Crohn’s surgery and started chemo, but it feels like forever — which is fine by me!

Fortunately, my Crohn’s has also been completely gone since the surgery, so for the last 18 months I’ve been healthier than any time in the last 20 years. The only undesirable side-effect of having working intestines is that actually digesting my food has caused me to gain considerable weight — 30 pounds compared to where I’ve been the last 10 years or so. This year I’m making some lifestyle changes… I’m not calling it a diet since diets tend to be temporary things. We’ll see how it goes, but the goal is to exercise more and eat healthier in general. It’s only been 1-2 weeks so far, but by writing it down here, I’m creating more incentive to continue.

Another clean PET scan

mike — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 23:15:12 +0000

Finished another quarterly PET scan last week, and saw my doctor today for the results, and as expected, all is still good. Now that over a year’s gone by since finishing chemo, he’s changing my scan schedule to three times a year instead of four. Look for another update in December…

PET scan number 5

mike — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:47:22 +0000

About a week ago I had my fifth PET scan — the fourth since finishing Chemo almost a year ago. The results came back completely clean, as expected. I probably have one more year of quarterly scans, then will start doing them less often. Chemo seems like such a distant memory now, that it’s hard to believe it really happened. It’s obviously great to keep getting the clean bill of health from the scans, but I’m also looking forward to having the scans less frequently.

Follow-up PET scan: clean

mike — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 21:29:50 +0000

Last week I had another quarterly PET/CT scan to continue verifying the success of my chemotherapy (Chemofreedom! was 7 months ago), and this morning I had my oncologist appointment to review the results. My doctor said I got an A+ on the test, and everything looks good (including the unexpected stomach and intestinal uptake seen in the last PET).

Reading the report from the PET lab, they do comment on several new areas of uptake on the scan, “probably representing brown fat uptake”. Great, now I’ve got a thousand dollar scan telling me I’m getting fat! Just switching to Coke Zero apparently hasn’t been enough to stem the tide. I think for now I’ll just say it’s keeping me warm for the winter, and I’ll watch my weight better in the spring

Look for another update in March!

Biopsy results finally back

mike — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 17:05:10 +0000

The results from my upper endoscopy and colonoscopy finally arrived last week, and showed no problems anywhere, so that’s some very good news. This whole process seems to have taken far too long — I finally have the “all clear” from my August PET scan that showed questionable results, and now it’s almost time for my next scan! Hopefully things will go more smoothly this time.

PET scan results

mike — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 16:10:55 +0000

Back on August 22 I posted a “3-month health update” blog entry, explaining that I had just had my follow-up PET scan. Especially clever readers may have noticed that I never posted the results of that scan.

The earliest oncologist appointment I could get was about 3 weeks after the scan, on September 12. When we went to the appointment, we were expecting the scans to show no activity at all, just like the one 3 months earlier after my last chemo treatment. However, the scan did show activity, only it wasn’t in the small bowel where my lymphoma was… this time the activity was in my colon and my stomach! The scan write-up was completely non-committal about what this could mean:

“While these may both represent physiologic uptake or secondary to inflammation, lymphomatous involvement is not entirely excluded and cannot be definitively distinguished by image.”

We scheduled a colonoscopy and upper endoscopy in order to get some tissue biopsies from both areas to get a more definitive answer. The colonoscopy was last week, and the endoscopy was this morning. We should have the results of the colonoscopy biopsies in a few days. On the bright side, the colonoscopy showed my insides to be at least visually much better than during the few exams, with much less Crohn’s inflammation.

Looking forward to getting these results, since the “uncertainty roller-coaster” gets pretty frustrating after a while.

3-month health update

mike — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 02:11:00 +0000

This morning at 7:30 I had my 3-month follow-up PET scan in Fairfax. I’ll be getting scans every 3 months for a while, then every 6 months, every year, and eventually (I hope) will stop altogether. My oncologist appointment isn’t for another three weeks (getting an appointment with any specialist in Northern Virginia is so difficult these days) so I won’t know the results for a while. Presumably, if the results are bad, I’ll hear about it in a day or two.

This afternoon was my first gastroenterologist appointment since late last year. The appointment was supposed to be a few weeks ago but got canceled (by them) due to some emergency. Sitting in the very crowded waiting room, Kathie and I overheard other patients talking and complaining about how long they had been waiting… some had been there an hour before us, and were being told that the wait could easily be another hour (for them… so two hours for us). We got up, rescheduled for a few weeks in the future and left. That’s the first time I’ve done something like that, but I guess it’s the first time in a long time that I’ve gone to a doctor when I’m not sick, and had that flexibility. Sure is nice!

In general, feeling very well, still feeling better than I have in the past 8 years or so!

Deported

mike — Fri, 18 May 2007 16:05:00 +0000

Got my port removed yesterday — woo hoo! Have a bunch of stitches and a big nasty tender bruise where it used to be, but it’s a small price to pay to be rid of it. Since there’s not much more to say about it than that, instead here’s a recent photo of our front garden. I’m still enjoying the new camera, but have a lot more to learn about photography and taking good photos.

NERD

mike — Fri, 11 May 2007 18:22:00 +0000

Had my Oncologist appointment today and got my PET scan results back: NERD. I’m used to being called that, but in this case it apparently means “No Evidence of Residual Disease“, which obviously was a huge relief! The more detailed explanation says “Hypermetabolic activity previously seen in the region of the terminal ileum is no longer present”. So, all that’s left now is to get my port removed next week, and then get PET scans every 3-4 months for a couple years. If nothing shows up after two years, the chances of it ever coming back are extremely slim. After five years, my chances are the same as the general population! After dealing with all this, and now officially being in the clear, I can definitely say that I highly recommend NOT getting cancer.

Now, time to get back to vacation planning