Doctor warned me up front that the odds the images find something that looks weird is high but not to panic because of how many false positives there are when looking inside someone’s body.
While I am happy to report they didn’t find anything serious, I do take slight offense to the following at the top of my results:
Last name, First name: Unremarkable
(Kidding of course but still got a chuckle out of me)
No offense for me, just confusion. One of the status reports started as follows:
> OptionOfT is a very pleasant 36-year-old gentleman 6 weeks status post left anterior total hip arthroplasty done by Dr. _ on _.
I asked my wife whether I was particularly friendly (I sometimes fail to adjust my demeanor in certain situations).
She said: nah, they write that for everybody.
Then you can just tab from field to field when doing the report.
She said “It’s just not often I hear that here.”
When my brother was at the end of his run fighting cancer he felt a bit under the weather and managed to catch covid so everyone figured he was feeling bad due to that. The PET scan showed he had thousands of small masses converging into the large mass that eventually killed him by cutting off blood flow to his kidneys. His cancer was an aggressive blood cancer that had stood up to conventional and Trial Chemo drugs. There was no way to treat this but other cancers that are less aggressive can be treated at this point and would be treated differently than a single mass.
In a nutshell it’s that level of visibility that makes PET scans worth it.
Getting regular scans to track cancer progression is a different matter altogether, since most of the blips can be eliminated over time and there’s a history to compare against.