Wednesday, August 1, 2012

A Perfect PET

It's not unusual for me to know the results of my PET/CT scans long before I sit down with my doctor. The scan is performed at the hospital and, once the results are ready, a summary is faxed to my doctor. Because I'm the patient though, I can go directly to the hospital and request a copy of the results. When there are several days between my scan and my doctor appointment, I'm prone to getting the summary early because the curiosity (and worry) are overwhelming.

This round was different though. My scan was on a Friday morning and my doctor appointment was on Monday morning, so there was no time for me to sneakily find out my results on my own. I'd have to wait for the doctor to deliver the news. By the time he came into the room I was ready to burst, certain I was going to simply blurt out "WAS IT OKAY?!?" with a crazed look in my eye. He beat me to the blurting things out though.

Dr: (clearly irritated): You're not getting scans there any more.

Me: (somewhat thrown off): Okay?

Dr: They shouldn't just put anything that's wrong in the report, they should outline everything they see. You're just not going back there for any more scans!

Me: (sort of laughing at his irritation, but now also alarmed that he referred to something "wrong" in the report): Okay?

Dr: (picking up on my alarm): Oh, nothing's wrong, but this report is awful!

Me: (giant sigh of relief) Oh thank goodness!

So that's how I found out that my PET/CT results showed NO CANCER, as an aside to my doctor's annoyance at the quality of the scan report.

Did you hear that folks? One hundred days out from receiving my donor's stem cells, my body is still not re-growing any cancer!

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