Friday, May 14, 2010

the world's itchiest forehead

Ok, PET/CT scan is done. I got to keep my arms by my sides and that it made it a LOT more relaxing. I think I actually slept through part of it. Here's a picture of the scanner:

I woke up at one point - why?  Because I had a REALLY itching forehead. I wondered why I couldn't move my hands. Huh? What's up with that? Hmm, my hands are under my ass. Why is that? Oh, yeah. I'm in the PET/CT scan machine. Right. And I shouldn't move ANYTHING or it will screw up the scan. So of course, my forehead is itchy. Ooh, that's going away. But now the right side of my nose is itching. Ahh! The tricks your body can play on you.

So, 27 1/2 minutes of diagnosing and I'm a free man. For you McKesson-ites, you'll be happy to know that your brand was well represented in the imaging room:

And  now, of course, the big question. What did the scan show? The technician doesn't tell you much but she did say "you'll like this one better than the last one!". So that's encouraging. The scan is setup as about 3500 images and there's a little viewer on the DVD that can animate the images. So it's takes a bit of time to find one that's related to the few I looked at in March that showed the tumors well. But I did just run one of the animations and things look  really promising! No big white spots in my neck or along the center of my chest. (Remember, in this imaging, white is bad, and the brighter the white, the worse, aka more metabolic activity). Anyway, I'll scrutinize this a bit more and post some more insights. Of course, I really have no idea what I'm looking at and I'll have to wait until Monday for the formal report. Arghhh! That will be hard to wait for. But we're definitely making progress along the road and that feels great.

1 comment:

  1. SO happy to hear that the PET scan shows less evil metabolic activity in the form of cancer cells! Yoga is good for shoulder stretching and quieting the monkey mind; sounds like you are getting lots of practice with mental discipline through this journey.

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