‘cancer’ Category
Pet scan #8
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
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
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
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
Last week I had another quarterly PET/CT scan to continue verifying the success of my chemotherapy ([[wplink 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 [[wplink 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!