Remission phase I

Mt. Fuji...so beautiful!!

The good news is that there was no sign of malignant tumor regrowth (forgive me for the less use of proper vocabularies) after 2 months of radiotherapy treatment!! I was nervous to hear the result, and I'm glad it turned out to be a good news. My next check up is scheduled on June 1st, for a ultrasound test. Then another one in August 3rd.


PET scan
Last week I had PET scan at a prefecture-owned hospital that was about 40 minutes north of my home. This is because Tsukuba University Hospital doesn't own PET machine, which was surprising to me since Tsukuba University Hospital is the largest and the only university-owned hospital in my prefecture, Ibaraki. Anyhow, the PET scan went smoothly, and it wasn't very different from the experience at the UW, the only thing is that patients were to be rested in a public room with a divider rather than a private room.

I learned that my fear for injection still exists, when the nurse was injecting contrast medium to my body I had to close my eyes because it reminded me of chemotherapy. Then I felt noxious after the PET scan was done, although that could be a side effect from contrast medium rather than Pavlovian effect.

WBC count low
Yesterday when I had a blood test womehow my WBC# was only 2200, where on average human has 4000~6000 WBCs. Both my doctors from haematology and radiology were unsure of the cause, thus I will need to go back to the hospital next week to check up my blood again.

Interestingly enough, my haematology doctor guessed that the low WBC# may be caused by radiotherapy. He guessed that the radiation may have hit bone marrow that it led to less production of WBC#. On the other hand, my radiology doctor said that the effect from radiotherapy is unlikely and he thinks the WBC# was influenced by chemotherapy.

I don't think they are necessarily trying to blame on each other, but it showed the difficulties of determining causation for any symptoms. And when one is specialized in a field, perhaps one is likely to point a finger to other fields, which is understandable, but we need someone to put the pieces together to show the big picture. This applies in any field.