CAT Scan Normal

Deb got her 3-month CAT scan Thursday (July 17), and it showed nothing abnormal. This is a huge relief and the best evidence we have yet that Gleevec is working.

If you remember, the surgery back in February did not get all of the tumor out; the surgeon cauterized a section of the surface of the liver and of the diaphragm rather than try to excise part of the liver. So the major question of the past five months has been whether the GIST was regrowing from those two spots. So far, at least, the answer seems to be no.

We had also been worried about her stomach. Over the last month she's had occasional stomach pains. They haven't been serious enough to slow Deb down, but they did have us concerned. She mentioned them to Jennifer McKenna, Dr. Lange's nurse practitioner, and the date of the CAT scan got moved up. Nothing abnormal showed up in the area of the stomach either.

While looking at GIST -survivor web sites recently, I ran across a great piece of slang for describing the current situation. Nobody talks about being "cured" of course, because Gleevec doesn't cure cancer so much as keep it in check.  So the best thing you can hope for out of a set of tests is to have what the doctors call "no evidence of disease". The survivors refer to this as "dancing with NED".