But cores are only a tiny strip, she reminded, and they only got one of the five. The cores their pathologist looked at didn't have any cancer cells. At 3pm, just 2 hours before my date with the hospital, the doc called and said she had news. Three days after that biopsy I was supposed to be admitted to begin my first round of RICE. 5 times they shoveled little stripes of tissue, called cores, into test tubes. I went in and they took a needle that looks like a pipe and prodded it into my chest, guided by ultrasound. My dad went to battle for me and demanded we get a biopsy, a tissue sample, of the lymph nodes in question to see what in the hell was going on before I submitted to 6 months of treatment and potentially lifethreatening side effects.ΔΆ weeks ago we did just that. I'd been feeling so good that I couldn't hardly believe it. At the end of it all, we realized we were looking at another 6 months of treatment of a considerably more damaging sort, followed by probably 6 months to a year of recovery. Post self-transplant I'd get full body radiation 6 times, then ANOTHER stemcell transplant, this time from a donor. That would be another 3 weeks in the hospital. This would be followed by a bone marrow transplant of my own marrow and another massive dose of chemo, lovingly referred to as BEAM. Salvage chemo, it's called, using a regiment called RICE which would put me in the hospital for 3 days every 21 days for 3 or 4 treatments. The doc wanted me to go straight into therapy. My family and I were shocked when the doc came in and said "YOUR DISEASE IS BACK." On the PET scan were 4 globes of light, 3 in the lymph nodes where my disease originally started, in my left armpit, and 1 in my spleen, where tumor burden was extremely heavy before my treatment. 4 weeks ago I had my second post-treatment PET scan.
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