PET-CT Scan Results

The good news is that there STILL doesn’t seem to be any cancer in the brain, bones, or liver. The bad news is that there is lots of cancer in the chest – the film negative showed my body in white and there were black spots all over the chest – sternum, under the arm, on the collar bone, over the lungs. There were so many black spots, I couldn’t really count them.

But my oncologist said it’s not IN the lungs, just in the soft tissue NEXT TO the lung, so it just LOOKS like it’s in the lung on the film. But later, on the phone, she said she’s not certain that it’s not in the lung. I don’t even know if it matters whether it’s IN or NEXT TO the lung. If it’s cancer, it’s cancer, right? But I assume it’s harder to treat if it’s in a major organ like the lung rather than in soft tissue and lymph nodes, which is where she thinks mine is.

So I need to have chemo again. Now I have to do a lot of research into the different chemo drugs available and decide which I want to take. What a huge responsibility. It’s good to be given the choices and the power to decide my own course of treatment, but in some ways, it would be nice to be a kid again and just let somebody else take over completely and make all the tough decisions for me.

I was prepared for and expecting the worst, so I didn’t take the news as badly as Tony did. I had a gut feeling that this was going to turn out to be cancer.

Before we got the results today, I joked that after having spent S$7,300 on these scans, they’d better find something so I can feel like I got my money’s worth. That’s a lot of money to spend just to be told that there’s nothing there. But now I’d gladly pay that much money and more for there to be nothing.