Today at MDA

Well today at MDA went smoothly. The mammogram wasn't as bad as the ones they do at diagnostic health. So I lived through it without too much pain. We went after a geocache when we got done, it was a multi though and it ended up being a wild goose chase. We spent about 2 hrs on it and finally gave up. After that, we really didnt' have enough time to get to the museum district, so we hit some of the gift shops and ate lunch. We came back and I had the ultra sound.

There was some good and bad news with the ultrasound. They did a more thorough one than they had done before on me. The good news is, there does not appear to be any nodes in my upper clavical area (right below my collar bone) that are affected. The bad news is, he measured my tumor on ultra sound and compared it to the ones I had done at diagnostic health in May and it hasn't actually shrunk. The tumor itself is still the same size, even though physically it feels smaller. The reason for this is that when a tumor forms it irritates the tissue around it, causing the tissue to become inflammed. The chemo has caused the soft tissue around it to return to normal, but it hasn't touched the tumor yet. This is ok though, considering I've only had 4 rounds of chemo. If it had shrunk as much as we had thought it would have been extraordinary. I think I'm going to bring back the reports and x-rays with me and talk to the oncologist I'm seeing and see if she agrees. Also, I think I'm going to ask her to measure it using this method in the future so we can actually tell for sure if it has or hasn't shrunk.