Dad and
Mom came down for his scheduled 6-month checkup. The tests, a blood test and a
PET scan, were today.
Dad has
been eating fairly well for not having a stomach and his energy level is high
enough to accomplish feats such as running a 2-hour half marathon, as he did a
couple weeks ago. It takes effort to consume enough calories but there is some
improvement and he's put some weight back on. So on the quality of life scale
he is doing quite well, but post-treatment scans are always a necessary part of
keeping things in check.
He scored
well on that front as well. There were two small spots that lit up on the scan
but they were small and in locations that his sort of cancer doesn't normally
migrate to, a lymph node in the arm pit and a spot in the colon. Given he had a
colonoscopy 12 months ago, the spot on the colon is not an issue and we'll just
have to keep an eye on the lymph node. Lymph nodes can be inflamed for any
number of reasons (simple infections can cause them to act up), and there is no
reason to believe it is a sign of cancer existing somewhere.
It is not easy to pinpoint the chances of cancer
coming back some time in the near or distant future. The doctor said it is not
likely, but honing in on any range of possibilities beyond that is not
appropriate. This is the case primarily because the sort of cancer he has is
rare enough that the sample data is not thick enough to proclaim a likelihood
with much certainty. For example, if on opening day a baseball player goes 1
for 3 in his at-bats, what would you guess his batting average would be for the
year? Our 3 data points say .333, but there are hundreds of at-bats left in the
season. So if you had to guess, your best guess is .333, but you wouldn’t say
you have much confidence in that number. Maybe he was facing a bad pitcher, or maybe the wind was blowing out and a ball that would have normally been caught for an out was a homerun. All those "chance" circumstances add noise to the data we care about. But as the season goes on and you gain
more data points, you can provide your guess with more certainty because you have more observations to rely on and you can remove some of that noise from the data you care about.
So
quality of life is great, the current diagnosis is good, we’ll look positively
to the future, and we’ll be forever appreciative of some quality Doctors.
