"Unremarkable"

This past Wednesday I had a PET/CT scan. It's the scan that makes me look like a fully lit Christmas tree when my cancer is growing. All the cancerous lymph nodes light up in bright colors and make the scan look interesting and vibrant.

Some pictures from one of my 2009 scans.

Today I found out that my scan was "unremarkable" (in the words of the radiologist who wrote up the report). There were no bright baubles floating in my chest. No shiny lymph nodes to catch one's eye. There was NO CANCER.

I'd worried most of Thursday night and into the early hours of Friday morning that the results were going to be bad. When someone fails an autologous transplant their long term survival rates are low. When someone fails an allogeneic transplant after failing an autologous transplant, their odds aren't talked about.

So a bad scan would have been very bad news. There aren't any further treatments that are likely to be curative. The word I ran across last night in the scholarly literature was palliative, meaning relief of suffering, not trying for a cure. From what I could find, even the clinical trials taking place right now are reaching early, disappointing findings.

It's possible that right now my cancer is being kept at bay by the last doses of Adcetris I received in December. From here on out we'll have to rely on my donor immune system to keep the cancer from coming back. I'm completely off of all my immuno-suppressants though, and the cancer is gone. So my immune system has all the advantages I can give it to hunt down any cancerous cells and quash them before they get out of control.

We'll do another scan in 3 months, which will tell us much more about how effectively my new immune system is able to fight off the cancer. Today results were VERY good news though. No cancer now means that even though my odds still aren't great, from where I'm at today I have the very best possible chance of beating this. So a small sigh of relief (to be followed by a restful night of NOT googling hematology journal articles).