VIRINGIA BEACH, Va. — Is the cancer confined to my prostate or did it spread?
The next step in my cancer journey was to answer that question.
Before I could seriously consider treatment options, I had to have full-body PET CT scans.
And now I have those results.
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And getting this information in a timely manner is critical as we hear from Dr. Robert Given, a urological oncologist with Urology of Virginia, "By getting this PET scanner we've definitely improved the time to get the scan done which is important because a lot of the patients were waiting six weeks to figure out what their treatment was going to be."
I mentioned to Dr. Given, you don't want to wait when you hear you have cancer and he added, "No, no particularly a higher grade one, you don't want to wait."
Which is why I was eager to have PET and CT scans, to begin getting answers from Dr. Given, "You know you had some different areas that part of it was higher grade, and so higher grade cancer is what we're looking for."
I admitted that sounded a little scary and he responded "It just means the cells look more aggressive to the pathologist and they are more aggressive in their actions."
Before the scans could get underway, first, I have to be injected with something. Think of it as a tracer that will circulate through my body.
Dr. Given explained,"You're going to get injected with a radionucleotide first that is targeted toward prostate-specific membrane antigen, which is over-expressed on prostate cancer cells."
Meaning what?
"So what that means is, it's gonna light up areas of prostate cancer in your body," he continued. "We know it's in your prostate, so that should light up, but where we're looking to see--- if it lights up anywhere else in your body."
So after being injected with the radioactive isotope, I have to wait for about 45 minutes to an hour to make sure it is circulating all through the body.
Eventually, it's time to head in what they call the doughnut for my scans. The process doesn't seem to take too long, maybe 20 minutes of scans.
Three weeks later, I'm back at Urology of Virginia for Dr. Given to read my results: "So the good news on the full body scan is that the prostate cancer is confined to the prostate—showed activity in the prostate as expected, but nothing outside the prostate. This is not one we can watch, sometimes with low-grade prostate cancer we can watch it, but, unfortunately, you don't have a low-grade prostate cancer, so we need to do some kind of treatment for it."
So that's the next step in my journey, considering my treatment options which include surgery to remove the prostate and various forms of radiation.
