Dr. Mike: now 99.99 % cancer free.

I had my mid-treatment PET/CT scan this week and it came back good. Real good. You can see the before and after scans in the picture. Not a trace of cancer at all. All the tumors seemed to have melted away! What's really neat is that now that the tumors are gone you can see some other organs like the kidneys and liver on the scan, since the tumors 'outshone' the signal from them before. I had no idea livers were so big. Gross. You can also see the awesome sock/Toms/hospital gown/hairy man leg combo I sported to the scan.

Does this mean I'm cured of cancer? No. Cue the math. The detection limit of a PET scan is about 10^6 cells, so it's likely I still have on the order of 1 million cancer cells running around my body. Based on my initial scan and the relative percentage of cancer cells in a Hodgkin's tumor, I calculate that I started off with something like 10^10 cancerous cells. This means that after 4 treatments of ABVD chemotherapy we've killed off (1-1,000,000/10,000,000,000) X 100% = 99.99% of the monkey faced bastards. Amazing!

Where to go from here? I'm not in the clear yet since there is still a chance I'll relapse at some point, but things are going as well as they can. I'm down for at least 4 more treatments of ABVD chemo to mop up the remaining cancer and then I need to make some decisions about getting further chemo and possibly radiation. But for the time being I'm celebrating with some cancer-fighting beer and pasties.