Milestone Tests: Overview

On average the follow-up milestone testing is done at the thirty day, three month, six month, one year, two year and five year marks.


Milestone testing is done to a) test for immune system re-growth, b) catch any organ problems following the high-dosage radiation and/or chemotherapy, and c) watch for any recurrence in your cancer or blood-related disorder.



This does not, however, mean that some additional testing in-between these milestones won’t occur.  Your milestone schedule is one generally followed by the transplant team’s protocol, however you should still have your primary oncologist and primary care physician in the picture, and their schedules will augment the transplant milestone testing.



A few examples:  My oncologist generally scheduled me for a PET scan every quarter before the transplant, so he added this as a test between my six month and one year milestone tests.  Just a month after my transplant we found a bump on my leg in our quarterly review with my oncologist.  He scheduled a needle aspiration biopsy which was performed and came up negative.  The results were of course forwarded to my Transplant physician.  Like many cancer patients who have had chemo, I have a porta-cath in my chest, and they want to leave it there as long as possible, so regular ‘maintenance’ must be done on it.  I go in to my oncologist’s chemo center for a flush of the line every six weeks, and every other time I see that physician as well.  After my transplant I had some blood pressure problems.  This issue was resolved by my primary care physician, who generally maintains my prescriptions.



All of the above were in addition to the transplant team’s objectives.  Always make sure that all of your key physicians are copied on any tests.  Keeping the lists and grids up-to-date will also provide your physician with additional insight to any new problems you might experience along the way.



Many tests done during the milestone markers are repeated from milestone to milestone, and most of them have been covered in a previous pages of this blog.  For this reason this Milestone Testing page mostly has blank PAGs with references to earlier pages for details: