Yay! No cancer!
Great news! As many know, Mom had her first follow-up PET scan last week since finishing radiation in March. Her last radiation treatment was the first day the big shutdown started (in Maryland, at least). So it had been ~ 4 months since her last radiation treatment. As she mentioned last week, it didn't look like any nodes or any other spots (where Merkel cell carcinoma tends to spread - lungs, liver, and bone) were lighting up. So that was all awesome news. What did light up was a little area on her stomach. A few hours after getting that result she met with her gastroenterologist and she was scheduled for an endoscopy, which happened yesterday. The great news is there was only a bit of gastritis (inflamed tissue) in the area that lit up on the PET scan -- no tumors, cancer, or anything like that. The not-so-great news is that she has an ulcer in a completely different area of her stomach. This was not picked up by the PET scan, so it seems like a good thing that she ended ...