Dr. Chuma, my E/N/T guy (and surgeon) explained by telephone this afternoon the "official" results of my PET scan. He said that there were two "hot spots" (that is, locations of high metabolic activity) that showed up on the scan:
-- one of them was the location of the first lymph node. The one he removed surgically some time ago. He said this was perfectly normal for tissue that was still recovering from surgery.
-- the other was another lymph node located just under the back corner of my chin bone on the left side. (I had pointed this out to him the other week as being another location possibly similar to the one that had started this entire process. It was a little tricky to find, since it feels like it's resting against the inside corner of the bone. I had the advantage in finding it since I'm inside all this stuff...) Since we've already established that lymph nodes cannnot be the source of the cancer, it did not clarify things that much.
So the PET scan did identify another piece of surgery that must take place in a week or so, but didn't locate the tumor. As explained elsewhere, the "blind biopsy" is still our best hope for locating that.
Good news: Randy didn't "light up like a Christmas tree" under the PET scan.
Pretty good news: Both lymph nodes with cancerous squamous cells showed up on the same side of my neck. Life would have been considerably more complicated if the second had shown up on my right side!!
Not-so-good news: We're still hunting for the tumor.
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