If all goes according to plan, I will start my biochemotherapy treatment on Monday, November 26, 2007. In the meantime, I am going through a battery of tests to see if we can find any additional cancer. The PET/CT scan does a good job of spotting the melanoma when it gets to a certain size, but may not spot the cancer at its earliest stages. Also, there is no blood or other test that can be used to determine if cancer is traveling elsewhere in the body.
So, instead we get to play pin the tail on the donkey. Replace the “tail” with sharp, pointy needles and replace the “donkey” with me, and there you have it. I can already here my Dad saying that he can’t see much of a difference in the latter change.
On Wednesday, I had a surgical procedure to biopsy several spots on the top of my head, some random and some targeted to areas where the cancer first developed. I was put out for that procedure, and woke up with a sore head, but no major pain.
Next up is a neck biopsy, which will be a little less ‘fun’. I don’t get to sleep through this one, and while I won’t feel the needle going in, I do have the pleasure of feeling it jab into the cancer cells in the neck in an effort to scrape enough to do a biopsy. Last time I did one of these, it took several pokes to get enough cells. And we have to do this in 3 different spots. Yeah!
Last up is a brain MRI. Apparently, PET/CT scans cannot provide as detailed a picture of the brain as the MRI can. Again, we are looking to determine if any cancer has spread to the brain. Let’s hope not.
We hope to have all of the results back just before Thanksgiving, and if everything comes back OK, we should be ready to begin on Monday the 26th.
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