Checking in - and out - and in - and out
As my summer began, I was finally ditching the oxygen I'd been lugging around since April and was looking forward to finishing my steroids and having a nice, relaxing summer. And then my PET scan happened. I have a PET scan once a year, and CT scans every 9 weeks, to see how my insides look. The last CT I had showed some growth in my lung lesions but nothing else, and so things looked pretty stable...although my CEA number, which can be a marker of the amount of certain kinds (including colon cancer) of cancer cells floating around your bloodstream, had begun to rise. So the PET scan would help us dig a little deeper and find out whether that rising number was a result of my pneumonia/pneumonitis (which can happen), or because of a new recurrence (keeping in mind that we already knew I had lung lesions that were slowly growing). Well, the PET showed those lesions, as expected, and also showed a little smudge in my liver - although nothing had shown up on the CT scan there. Due t