Wow, I am so far behind on my blog! This second half of 2014 has flown by so fast I feel like I've missed half of it. I'm going to make this brief, although it's all good news so far.
In August I had two big tests scheduled - a CT scan and Bone scan. In the past this would have been just a PET scan. I go over this test in detail in my transplant pages, but in short, a PET scan is a nuclear medicine imaging test. A glucose dye is injected prior to the test and then the machine scans your body in a tube at small intervals over a relatively long period time - you're moved about 4" every six minutes. It takes two 35 minute scans to do your upper and lower body for a total of just over an hour in the tube. The glucose is drawn to areas of your body where sugar consumption is high, and is seen as a 'hot spot' on the film. Things that can cause hot spots are healing injuries (strains, bumps, bruises, cuts, etc.) and cancer. Healing injuries need energy to heal, while cancer cells are combining incorrectly at a high rate of speed, and so will also require energy. This is why, at least in part, people suffering from cancer will lose weight when their disease is active, and regain the weight when the disease is not active.
Normally this is a 'big' test, run once a year post-transplant, however there is now a lifetime limit on this test for two reasons: 1. It's expensive, and insurance companies want to keep costs low, and 2. It exposes a patient to a lot of radiation, which is something you want to avoid. The limit is now 4 PET scans paid for in a lifetime, and that change when into effect in June 2013. I've had perhaps a dozen PET scans since I was diagnosed, and the last one was run right before the rules changed, in April, 2013. So this year, no PET scan, but the bone and CT scans instead. These will not catch a blood cancer, but they will show mass tumors and problems with bone density that can indicate cancer as well.
So both were run in August and both were clear - yay! I'm a little off schedule now, since this big test was actually run a few months before my 4th year post-transplant anniversary, which is this month. In fact just four years ago I was in the hospital on this day, about a week post-transplant, feeling like crap, and waiting for my immune system to rebuild itself. It took a few weeks, but by Oct. 25th, 2010, my numbers blood numbers looked good, and I got to go home. It's hard to believe it's now been four years - it's a really good milestone, since normally blood cancers would recur sometime in the two years immediately after a transplant. I had a visitor during my hospital stay - a guy who was among the first patients to ever have a bone marrow transplant (they didn't do stem-cell transplants back then), and he was 18 years post-transplant! I guess that's what you really call a successful outcome.
At any rate, things are going well on the health front, although I still struggle with my weight and exercise. I'm seeing a specialist on this at the end of the month, since now it's more important than ever, given my overall good results in the other categories. I've been getting a lot of writing in, and have attended a few conferences as well, so a lot of activity on that front as well, but more on that later.
Now if I can just remember how to organize the pages in my blog and get this entry into searchable shape!
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