August 16, 2006 - Day 1- Week 20 - Disbelief and Discovery

When told you have cancer there is the immediate knee jerk reaction that indicates dismay and disbelief.  No one wants to hear those foreboding words, and all kinds of scenarios play through the brain, most of them unpleasant.  I have had, since the first week of April, ample time to process and accept what I was experiencing, but frankly I was ill prepared to hear that my PET was negative.

Today, with a bit of perspective and reason guiding my thinking, I began to wonder if there was such a thing as false negatives when it comes to the PET and CT scans.  Was my blood sugar too high that day to get an accurate reading?  Oddly enough it was 285 the morning of the test.  The team of attending lab technicians and doctors agreed that I did not have to postpone, but I am almost at the point where this miracle of transformation I am told has happened is too good to be true.

Friend Susan Love, cancer specialist writes:  “Not all doctors use PET scans because they have not been proven to be accurate.”  Dr. Susan Love is a leading expert on breast cancer so her comments are taken to heart.   She continues:  “They are not very sensitive (tumors need to be about 2cm to be seen) and at the same time they often give false positive results, indicating that something might be cancer when it is really an inflammation, infection, or cells that happen to be growing rapidly.”  This was not my case at all, the pounds of tumors were very real and all pervasive, and however, this raises the question:  Are there false negatives?  What I think this means is that a negative scan means no cancer is detected, but is that 100% reliable.  Today is a day to ask a few more questions.

Learning for Today:  This quest I am on is part of the constant process of discovery required when battling cancer.  I am up at the computer at 6:50 am this morning discovering that there is so much to learn and so few precious hours in a lifetime.

I have learned to give thanks in so many ways and it may take me awhile to process the fact that one day I am loaded with cancer and the next day I am not.  This shifting of thought may require more attention than moving from disbelief about having cancer in the first place.  Bear with me for a few days.  I will use my daily writings as catharsis and humility.

My heart is filled with gratitude. My days ahead will be filled with new discoveries. Thanks for joining with me on the journey; it surely has been one that I could not have scripted.  Hugs, and thanks for the yellow sunshine that I feel on my shoulder today.

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