Know your enemy

So next steps is information gathering and then decision making.

Friday 23rd - full body PET scan with the Nuclear Medicine Department at the Royal Marsden Sutton.  This takes about two hours.

Tuesday 27th - joint H&N plus Throcic clinic will make a call on the next steps to take.  If the PET scan confirms findings from the CT scan, then operation soon after will be next step.

Wednesday 28th - I expect to hear feedback from  the clinical team on Tues afternoon or else Wed morning.  This feedback will be to confirm next step, which we expect to be to recommend an operation. Operation is a referal to a Cardio-Thoracic Surgeon at the Royal Brompton which is a short walk from from the Royal Marsden Fulham in Chelsea.

So it seems I am in the unlucky 1/3 of the following data from my last post six years ago:   "Distant metastases were the most common type of disease recurrence, developing in 74 patients (37%) of whom 62 (31%) were disease-free at the primary site."

This distant spread will not be confirmed until after the op, and a bi-opsy, although it seems the odds of it being anything other than distant metastases (spread) is very unlikely.

Next big milestone: PET scan result, Wed 28th April.

PET Scan Result.  This will confirm whether the cancer has spread anywhere else.  If it is only as observed in the CT scan this is good news.  Bad news would be they've found of metastases of the cancer in other places.