Staging Results and Final Diagnosis

First, I want to say to everyone who have posted comments, thanks. It's great to receive such positive thoughts from wonderful folks like you. The past two weeks have been busy to say the least. Lots of needles, scans, consultations, etc. My apologies for being a bit on the silent side. I felt that one post to cover the results would be best. So here we go. The final diagnosis is that I have stage 2 Hodgkin's Lymphoma. This is a good result. Reason is that the Lymphoma has not spread to other parts of my body. It's primarily in the neck and the chest region. If it was only in one lymph node region, then I would of been stage 1. But since it is in multiple areas of the chest and neck, I'm stage two. During a visit to the radiologist this week she did mention that the size of the tumor that I have in my chest was impressive and its up against my air pipe and close to the chest cavity. Good thing we're early.

Here are the results of the tests. If you read any of the previous blogs I mentioned a few of these tests that I was going through. The one I was worried about the most was the bone marrow and that one came back negative. So the factory is all good. I also had a abdominal/pelvis CT scan that came back negative. This test checked out all of my organs and lymph nodes below the chest past the groin area. Then the final scan was the PET scan which is the most thorough body scan where they inject some radioactive sugar into your body and put you through a scanner in order to trace where the sugar goes. Your heart and brain eat a lot of sugar and so do tumors. This test came back negative as well. Numerous blood tests came back negative. These tests were primarily looking at white and red blood cell counts along with organ functions. I believe they were also looking for other cancer indicators as well. And finally, since the chemotherapy can cause shortness of breath and possible long term cardiac damage they ran tests to established a baseline of where I am at right now. Those tests came back favorable where i demonstrated good lung capacity and a high percentage of blood being able to be pumped through the heart.