Clean PET/CT scan - yeah!

Last Thursday I had another CT/PET scan as suggested by the protocol we're following. Yesterday I got to review the results with our oncologist. All really good news on that front! No elevated cellular activity in any of the regions where I had my tumors and all the nodes are gone/normal in appearance with the exception of one node. For the type of Hodgkins I have (nodular schlerosing) it is pretty common that a node forms in your lymph node that looks abnormal even after all the bad cellular activity is gone. It can take several months for this node to go down and is basically a vestigial sign of the disease. I'll get another PET scan 3 months after my chemo completes and that will be the next big diagnostic milestone. So the summary from the scan is that I have no visible sign of disease. There a bunch of axial views (top down) that are provided in 3 mm slices that are great for looking at the details of the tumor sizes and metabolic activity. But they're pretty hard to understand and I wouldn't do them justice in a description here. The simple view is the one below. In March, there were a bunch of black (high metabolic activity) chunks in my chest and throat. As you can see below, all of those are gone. The black spots on this scan are all normal - these are all my organs flushing the radioactive sugar from my body (spleen, kidneys, bladder, etc.)

Another positive note about this scan is given how clear things are and how small the last node is, I'll probably not need any radiation. We'll get a radiation consult in August to make sure we're consulting an expert (the blood guys and the radiation guys are connected in our cancer center but distinct because they're expertise and treatment mechanisms are quite different) but the strong sense is that no radiation will be needed.

Pretty happy about all of this - now just need to get through another 41 days of chemo craziness and then start the post chemo healing process. We're getting there!!!