CT Scan is negative and thats good!

Today we met with the oncologist and got the results of the CT Scan and they were negative.  And as always negative is good.  The cancer has not spread to anywhere else in the body so they think that this was caught early.  Big time yippee! for that.  All of the test from the surgery, blood work and CT Scan show this as being a stage I cancer.  At this point it is undetectable.  Once again big time yippee! for that.

I should mention that there was some anxiety leading up to this.  It started when the person that did the CT-Scan wished me good luck.  The last time that happened I was diagnosed with my first cancer as a stage III/IV two days later.  Also the first business day after this test the doctors office called and said they needed to see me the next day.  They already scheduled the appointment for late afternoon not asking if I could make it or not.  That starts to get your mind wandering a bit. 

For follow up treatment there are two options.  The first is to just monitor with tests and see if it does spread.  There is about a 20% chance that it could still spread.  Given that the treatment for this cancer is highly successful they normally recommend this course of action.  The second option is to have a single round of chemotherapy with a single drug, carboplatin.  This reduces the chance of it spreading to 3%.  Either way I am still in the 99% cure group.  Given my past history the recommendation is to do the preventative chemo therapy.  The reason is that the treatment if it does spread involves three rounds of a 3 drug group, one of them being cisplatin.  I have already had some very high doses of that drug in the past and it did do some damage.  The concern is that I will have increased toxicity to those drugs and that could cause other long term problems that I may not fully recover from.

Supposedly the carboplatin treatment is nothing like what I have been through.  Basically there is some nausea, potential for some hair loss and fatigue but it lasts less than a week.  The plan at this point is to schedule the chemo for this Friday.  Hopefully there won't be any hurricanes that day.  :-)