The Ninth Season
"Honey, it's over. None of that happened." Bobby Ewing, as he stepped out of the shower, to his future wife Pam, reassuring her that all the bad things that happened in Dallas’ ninth season were just a bad dream.
In the last episode I had just gotten out of my third cycle of salvage chemo after a trip to Indianapolis to visit Dr Larry Einhorn, the testicular cancer specialist. Dr Einhorn called May 2nd to tell me that his pathologist had noticed something unusual about my tumor cells and decided to run some further tests. The results came back negative for testicular cancer! I have been misdiagnosed! I don’t have testicular cancer I have Non-Hogkins B-Cell lymphoma (which, ironically, is what my surgical oncologist and original CT scan report suspected from the very beginning – before my first biopsy). My tumor cells had been tested by three pathologists (including MD Anderson) and they were all wrong. Usually, the distinction between the two types of cancers is easy to make but because I’m “special” the lymphoma cells presented themselves enough like seminoma that there was confusion. I could have gone through the whole round of testicular cancer treatments and never known that I had lymphoma. Luckily some of the same chemo drugs that are used with testicular cancer are used with lymphoma and would have kept the cancer at bay but I wouldn’t have been cured until, as a last resort, I had a bone marrow transplant.
What happens now? This week I’ll undergo a PET scan, a MUGA scan to look at my heart and a bone marrow biopsy. The results of those tests will help determine a treatment that will probably include more chemo and a bone marrow transplant. Then I’ll meet with doctors to discuss the results and decide where to be treated and make sure that I really do have lymphoma (samples of my original biopsy have been sent to NIH and NCI. The NIH has confirmed the lymphoma diagnosis, saying it was a difficult one to determine). My doctors have assured me that my prognosis for lymphoma is better than it was with testicular cancer which has a pretty high cure rate itself.
Hopefully there won’t be any more surprises.
In the last episode I had just gotten out of my third cycle of salvage chemo after a trip to Indianapolis to visit Dr Larry Einhorn, the testicular cancer specialist. Dr Einhorn called May 2nd to tell me that his pathologist had noticed something unusual about my tumor cells and decided to run some further tests. The results came back negative for testicular cancer! I have been misdiagnosed! I don’t have testicular cancer I have Non-Hogkins B-Cell lymphoma (which, ironically, is what my surgical oncologist and original CT scan report suspected from the very beginning – before my first biopsy). My tumor cells had been tested by three pathologists (including MD Anderson) and they were all wrong. Usually, the distinction between the two types of cancers is easy to make but because I’m “special” the lymphoma cells presented themselves enough like seminoma that there was confusion. I could have gone through the whole round of testicular cancer treatments and never known that I had lymphoma. Luckily some of the same chemo drugs that are used with testicular cancer are used with lymphoma and would have kept the cancer at bay but I wouldn’t have been cured until, as a last resort, I had a bone marrow transplant.
What happens now? This week I’ll undergo a PET scan, a MUGA scan to look at my heart and a bone marrow biopsy. The results of those tests will help determine a treatment that will probably include more chemo and a bone marrow transplant. Then I’ll meet with doctors to discuss the results and decide where to be treated and make sure that I really do have lymphoma (samples of my original biopsy have been sent to NIH and NCI. The NIH has confirmed the lymphoma diagnosis, saying it was a difficult one to determine). My doctors have assured me that my prognosis for lymphoma is better than it was with testicular cancer which has a pretty high cure rate itself.
Hopefully there won’t be any more surprises.
posted by Tres at 8:31 PM
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