Oncologist Appointment - PET results

Finally had my appointment with the oncologist yesterday and have news that is hard to relay.  This was the time that we would make plans to remove my port-a-cath.  That didn't happen.

Dr Onc went straight to the point that there is a small spot that has an uptake.  Meaning that a piece of my body found a use for the nice radiated sugar substance they shot into me.  It is so difficult to explain that I may leave you with more questions than answers.

The spot is in my chest area, next to the lung.  It is not on the lung, heart of liver, it's just there.  Since my PET scan of 15 months prior it has grown only 4 mm (12 mm in size) but has an uptake now of 4, where it used to have none.  Typically cancer has an uptake of 12 or more so this may be very early cancer.

The thing is that it is in a very difficult location to get to.  Dr Onc is talking to a couple of doctors to make sure they can do what he wants done.  If they can't he wants to wait and do another PET scan in 3-4 months.

He wants to do a needle biopsy but he also wants to make sure two things happen:

1. That they get enough of a sample to give us a definite answer.  It is possible for a spot to have some cancer and have some area of not cancer and it they don't get enough of it we could get a false sense of security from a negative result.

2. That they don't pull cancer cells out on the needle, leaving what is called a cancer trail.

He says these things are very dependent on who is doing the procedure, just like some people with drivers license are better drivers than others.  We also need to make sure the person doing it doesn't poke my lung.  They will use a CT scan to make sure of where the needle is.

Dr Onc is a little puzzled at the location and says it's a little odd that the cancer would jump from my colon to this area without touching my liver or lungs so maybe that's good news.  However, I did ask him if this could be leftover sarcoidosis and he informed me that while sarcoidosis can go anywhere in your body it does not have an uptake.

Needless to say, all of this is running through my head and while I have a lot of hope of hearing good news I also have concern when I start thinking about the statistics I was told when originally diagnosed.  I had less than a 50% of survival for 5 years with surgery alone and chemo was supposed to give me a little better than 50% chance.  It's been almost two years.  But it sounds like we have caught this little area very early and all should be good, right?

I guess I feel like kicking and screaming and have a good ole hissy fit, then pulling myself together and dealing with it.  We'll just get the fit out of the way first to clear our minds to deal with it properly.

tags: cancer  mass  oncologist