Boston visit yesterday

Hi everyone -
Back in Boston again. Yesterday, Rick had a PET CT and we were supposed to visit with Dr. Sugarbaker. Our doctors in Tucson and Boston wanted the PET CT to have a look at what is happening in Rick's chest although all cautioned us not to expect any clear information at this point. With the PET CT, Rick is given an IV with glucose and then he sits very still for an hour. They run the scan and anyplace in his body where there is injury, significant metabolic activity, and cancer will light up. Rick's chest cavity is still recovering from surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, so we were told that the area of injury will still light up.

After the test we went to Sugarbakers office and checked in - only to learn that Sugarbaker had been called away on an emergency and wouldn't be back until Friday. We waited for 4 1/2 hours in the outer office because DaSilva was seeing all the patients and they were extremely behind schedule. Heather and Rod Nash were also waiting so we had a great time chatting and laughing about how awful this whole process has been. (Heather had her surgery right after Rick's and we have become friends.)

Finally, we were called back and after another significant wait, DaSilva came in, flipped through the images from the PET CT and said there was still uptake at the site of the surgery and it was too soon to know if it was just injury of if there was still meso there. (Just as predicted.) There was good news though....No other part of his chest, lung, abdomen lit up at all - so there is no meso in any other part of the body. The part that did light up was a very thin line of pink to blue coloring - not the ugly hot yellow that glowed at us on earlier PET CT's.

We will be coming back to Boston in late February and they will be able to tell us more then. In the meantime, we will wait for the written report from the scan and will show the scan to our oncologist and surgeon in Tucson. I also plan to e-mail Dr. Sugarbaker to ask him to review the scan and tell us what his impression is.

So we continue to live with uncertainty, but we feel that there was a lot of good news to celebrate about. Thanks to all of you for your calls and continuing support.
Sue