Another scan and further treatment. Gold again!

Yesterday, I had another PET/CT scan, the first one after the Cyberknife surgery, but the eighth one overall ever since I was diagnosed with cancer! And, today, I met my team of doctors - Dr.Ajai Kumar (Radiation Oncologist and Cyberknife Specialist), Dr.Niti R. Narang (Medical Oncologist) and Dr.Kumaraswamy (Radiation Oncologist) - with the scan report and the CEA test results (this time CEA value increased to 17.4 when compared to the earlier value of 7.2!)

The scan report is a mixed bag of both good and bad news for me; the good news is that the Cyberknife radiosurgery technique on my liver that I had last December has been very effective and my liver is fine now :); the bad news is that there is a bit metastasis of the disease, which means that the disease has gone further up a bit in the body with its presence in the form of a small nodule in the mediastinal lymphnode - this lymph node lies between the lungs in the chest. Already there has been another nodule in the lymph node near the liver and this was not considered for the Cyberknife treatment last time since it was too significant to treat. Now, this nodule has increased in size a bit. So, there are primarily two nodules to treat, both in the lymph system - one, near the liver and the another between the lungs.

Thus, my team of doctors, after thorough discussions, have decided to take a strategy of a combination of chemotherapy with another dose of Cyberknife radiation. The advantages of this strategy is that the radiation will treat the nodule near the liver completely and the chemotherapy will take care of the other nodule, or any other one in the body! I am convinced with their plan and hence decided to go ahead with it. Consequently, as a first step to radiosurgery, there will be another fiducial implantation in the form of a gold seed marker in the lymph node near the liver. This process will be done tomorrow as part of the usual process for the Cyberknife radiation. And, the chemotherapy will start in parallel this week too with the body exposed to the maximum effectiveness of the treatment.

I hope with this aggressive strategy of a parallel combination of radiation and chemotherapy will produce excellent results and work wonders for me. :) Keep watching this space for more updates :)