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Sarahthequeen05

I am a spunky 25-year-old living in a suburb of Tampa. I was relocated here with my husband of 2 years from western North Carolina when the Air Force decided that we were needed in sunny Florida! I had almost all the best times of my life at Salem College in Winston-Salem, NC, the oldest women's c...

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Victory!

PET/CT scans are really quite remarkable when you consider what they are.  It’s actually a combination of imaging scans, the PET and the CT. The CT, as most of you probably know, is simply a 3-dimensional x-ray that looks at your entire torso and also slices the images into cross-sections.  Easy peasy. 

But, the PET, the PET is another animal altogether.

They start an IV in your arm.  Then, they take you to a “quiet room”, a dark room with lounge chairs and pillows and blankets.  A small lead box is carried in, containing an almost-Pringles-can-sized syringe.  The needle is tiny, but the syringe is huge.  It is also lead.  There are signs instructing you not to talk or read or eat or drink anything.  It’s hard to keep your stomach from rumbling, because you haven’t eaten anything since the night before.

They inject you with the syringe contents, followed by a little bit of saline to help the mixture flow through your veins.  The mixture is a type of radioactive glucose.  That’s why it was housed in lead.  You are not to be around any children or pregnant women for the rest of the day, just in case.  You have to sit still in this dark room, not doing anything at all, for a little more than an hour.

They take you down the hall and lay you onto a table.  For the first 5-7 minutes of the test, the table slides back and forth through a rounded portal that looks very much like the stargate from the movie of the same name.  During this time, the machine is bombarding your body with positrons, (hence “PET”- positron emitting test).  The positrons interact with the radioactive glucose in your body, causing your body to emit gamma radiation, which is picked up by the highly specialized PET scan camera.

Cancer cells metabolize much faster than regular cells.  This makes sense when you consider the inherent nature of a cancer cell- they grow and divide much more rapidly than a normal cell and don’t die off like they’re supposed to once they’re a certain age, which a normal cell would.  Thus, cancer cells will gobble up all that radioactive sugar before any of your other cells ever get a chance.  They are greedy, gluttonous bastards that show no mercy.

Thus, a PET scan can detect active cancer cells anywhere in the body, even ones that haven’t clumped together to form tumors yet, which is pretty freaking amazing, I think.  This is especially important for my kind of cancer, which causes bands of non-cancerous scar tissue in my lymph nodes.  The affected nodes will probably always be larger than the regular ones, so a regular x-ray or CT scan would still show a mass in my chest, unable to distinguish between cancerous tissue and dead scar tissue.  Only a PET scan could tell the difference.

After my PET scan in June, which was to determine the stage of my cancer, my oncologist told me that my lymph nodes, “lit up like Christmas trees”.  They had absolutely gorged themselves on all that radioactive sugar.  My liver, thankfully, was clear, which we had not expected, since it was swollen to almost twice its normal size.  Once again, something that a CT or an x-ray would not have been able to tell us; they would just have seen a really big liver and assumed cancer, not that it was cancer-free and just plain weird.

My liver is back down to normal and my liver enzymes are finally in a normal range after being elevated for almost a year.  This is terribly exciting to me, because I’ve been baby-ing my liver for months.  No alcohol, spreading my pills and supplements throughout the day instead of taking them all at once so my liver will have an easier time breaking them, drinking lots of fluids, etc.

Today was a doctor’s visit and the end of my 3rd round of chemo- halfway done.

“So, how ya doing?”  His shirt today was an unassuming blue plaid instead of the usual Hawaiian shirts or Oxford shirts with wacky neckties.

“You tell me- you have the PET scan results.”  I’d been waiting since before Labor Day, so I was both anxious and frustrated.

He laughed and sat down, opening my chart.  He hadn’t said anything yet, so I felt a tiny twinge of concern.

“It was a negative scan.  There’s no evidence of the disease.”

I stared at him.  “What?  You mean nothing showed up?”  I wasn’t sure if I believed him.

I got up and went over to read the report myself. 

There is fairly normal tracer distribution throughout the body for FDG.  Abnormal activity in the previously noted metabolic lymph nodes is not seen at this time.  There is complete resolution.  Note is made of some diffuse increased activity along the bone marrow and the spleen.  This is possibly due to some granulocyte stimulating factors or therapy with the bone marrow stimulants.  Abnormal focus to suggest persistent or metastatic disease is not present. 

Negative exam showing dramatic improvement since the last PET scan of June 2008.  There is no evidence for recurrent or metastatic disease noted on this exam.

Despite the medical language, I knew the meaning of this exactly.  It was my first day of school and both graduations and meeting my best friend and my sister being born and my first date with my husband and both of our weddings and every Christmas and birthday I’ve ever had all wrapped up together.

I blinked and looked at him.  He was grinning like a mule.  We both grabbed each other and hugged.  I was crying and laughing at the same time.  He kissed my cheek.  I was so overwhelmed I had to sit down.

I’ll still finish up my 6 cycles of treatment, which means that I’ll be done around the first week of December.  It’s the same principle for taking your entire regimen of antibiotic even though you’re feeling better; you don’t want your sinus infection to recur.  You want to make sure it’s ass is good and kicked.

It’s been very difficult to celebrate, since I’m typing this in the chemo office, currently hooked up to the IV machine that monitors my drips, and I’m surrounded by people who are still so very, very sick.  I feel a little guilty about smiling so much.  But it is such a relief.  Just because your prognosis is good, because 92% of your cancer has been cured, doesn’t mean that you don’t worry. 

What if you’re part of the 8%?  Do you think when the 8% patients first found out they had cancer that they knew they wouldn’t make it?  No, because their prognosis was good and their cancer had a 92% cure rate.  So you still worry that maybe your doctor’s wrong, that you’re destined to be an 8% statistic instead of a 92% statistic.  I think this is inevitable; isn’t it human nature to automatically assume the worst?  To worry even when worrying won’t help at all?

I do feel a sense of accomplishment, maybe more than anything else.  I did it.  I survived cancer.  I survived chemo.  I will not have to have radiation.  I will celebrate Columbus Day and my second-second anniversary and Halloween and my Granny Mae’s 90^th birthday and my mother-in-law’s birthday and Thanksgiving and my sister’s birthday and Christmas and New Year’s cancer free.  And every special day from now until the end of my time on this earth will be a celebration of the day itself and being cancer free.

We’re home from chemo now and I’m so tired that I’m going to take a nap.  But I wanted to share my day’s happiness with you.