Malcolm will have the first of two or three MiBG scintigraphy scans tomorrow, with the second on Wednesday and possibly a third on Thursday. These scans use a radioactive isotope to try to mark other tumours in the body. So on Saturday, Malcolm began taking an iodine solution to protect his thyroid, and today he got the radioisotope injection.
This afternoon, we'll meet the endocrinologist-oncologist, Shereen Ezzat. We have a few questions for him, but it's hard to know exactly what to ask, so we hope he'll volunteer a lot ... nothing is absolute with this. Several of the measurements are not as negative (in the emotional sense) as they could be. But that doesn't mean Malcolm is cured. And Malcolm's and my own understanding of what we're being told keeps shifting -- for example, the first doctor to give us the name of the disease specifically said it wasn't cancer. But it is cancer. That particular doctor is just one of the group of physicians who don't want to use the word because NETs are usually so slow-growing.
One of the things I want to know relates to the 20 samples that were tested for their rate of growth. These samples were each assigned a rating of between 2 and 20. The rating system is such that 15 is pretty good, but anything over that is more serious, and 20 is quite serious. So how many of our samples were over 15? Where were those fast-growing ones located? What does this mean over the long term?
The surgeon and the oncologist may be able to answer the first couple of questions, but the last question is always going to be a gamble.
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