What's In a Scan?

Well, in my case, my life. Or the answer to the question, do I get to live?

Now that I'm coming to the end of my chemo (hopefully), I'm starting back into scans (bone, CT, and breast MRI).  All are meant to answer the long-awaited question of how far has the cancer been kicked back.

The breast ultrasound yesterday showed a significant decrease in size of the breast tumor by perhaps up to two-third. The tumor is still too close to the pectoral wall, so the breast MRI will give us more info about that.  However, my breast surgeon (God love her) remarked that the MRI might even show that some of what looks like tumor on the ultrasound is now scar tissue.  Yeah, scar tissue. Root for that.

The CT and bone scan will tell us if the cancer is in the bone (it wasn't before, so let's keep it that way) and if it's still on the liver.  I'm shooting for nothing on the liver. Why? Because that means chemo is over and I can go straight to bilateral mastectomy and then on to maintenance doses of Herceptin. In other words, I'd get my life back.

And moving on with my life sounds pretty darn good to me right now.  I like my bed and my couch, but they've gotten a bit too familiar. And the only command my dogs seem to follow nowadays is "sleep."  I bet they're getting tired of that too.

Check back for more news. And let's all hope and knock on wood that it's good. I could use some good news about now. And the dogs would like to relearn certain commands like "walk".