The good and the bad

(10/05/09)

Just a quick update tonight. I did finally get the PET-CT today (the floor attending apparently pulled some strings to make that happen - they were going to make me wait til Wed), and the unofficial read is that the liver mass is mostly blood! Yay! Part of the bad news is that the edge of the liver did look brighter on the scan, so it could be tumor. It's also possible that it's just inflammation, but I'm not holding my breath on that. The other part of the bad news is that the official read on the CT scan from Saturday says that there may be a lesion on a bone in my pelvis, something that's new since the last scan. Apparently it looks like it's breaking down the bone there. Nobody's really said much about that, but hopefully the official PET-CT report will have more information.

As for next steps, I got a CT angiogram done earlier this evening to try and track down the source of the bleeding in my liver. Apparently my blood counts have been slowly dropping, and so they think there's a slow bleed somewhere there. Unfortunately my doctor friend says angiograms have a tough time localizing the source if the bleed is slow, so it's possible they still won't know whence* it's bleeding. Right now I'm just really thirsty because they haven't let me eat or drink since 4:30pm. It's now almost midnight. They want to see the results of the scan before letting me eat or drink, in the event that something (probably another embolization) needs to be done tonight. Urgh. At least I got them to give me some saline so I'm not completely dehydrated. I am tired though, so dis post ends here.**



* "from where" - couldn't resist the chance to use an archaic subordinating conjunction. Yes, I'm a little bit of a grammar freak.

** well, except for these footnotes :P