Abnormalities in the lungs

Lung stuff
Hi Krista,

Well, I'm sort of in the same boat as you, where I'm a bit of an enigma to my doctors. My first PET scan, which was last March, 2008, lit up with one spot on my lung. The fact that it lit up on the PET scan makes it very suspicious for being cancer. So a CAT scan of my lungs was ordered and sure enough this "spot" that lit up was a 10-12mm lesion.

I'm not sure what your oncologist meant by the CT scan only shows 3mm at a time... my CT scan showed that it was 10-12mm depending on what angle you looked at it. My lung surgeon showed me and said the fact that it lit up the PET scan and then showed me how the edges of the lesion on the CAT scan were not smooth, that it's a pretty sure bet that it is cancer. On that same first PET scan, it also showed my right adrenal gland lit up... which is a very strange place for colon cancer to spread to, but I had my right adrenal gland surgically removed at the end of June and sure enough, it was a spread of the colon cancer, so my lung surgeon is pretty sure this one in the lung is too.

On that same CT scan, it found 6 small (less than 6mm) spots that were worth watching. That was in March, had the adrenal surgery in June and then in August I went for another CT and then PET scan. The CT scan showed that 3 of the nodules/spots had not changed, 2 had grown slightly and 1 was brand new (6mm). The radiologist, the lung surgeon and my oncologist all say these are growing so agonizingly slow, they are not sure what we are dealing with with the small 6mm and under ones... we only know that the 14mm (which had grown to 16mm) was 99% sure it was cancer. The lung surgeon doesn't want to go in and do the surgery to remove the 16mm until we know what the others are... and if they are cancer, he'd rather I do 6 rounds of chemo to see if 1) they shrink or go away (which means they are cancer if they are affected by the chemo) and 2) if there are any other cells just starting to take root, the chemo might kill them off. Then we'd do the surgery.

My oncologist wants a third opinion, since these are growing so slowly. If they are NOT cancer, then she doesn't want me to go through 3 months of chemo only to find they aren't cancer and we could have just gone ahead with the surgery and removed the one. So she's sending my scans to a radiologist at another hospital to have him see if it would be to my benefit to have the spots ablated (using a needle/tool and CT scan, he'd enter the spot and zap it with some sort of heat).

It's true... the spots could be anything, if they are growing so slowly! It's possible that it's just cancer growing extremely slow... on the other hand, it could be some scarring in your lung. They are pretty sure two of mine are scarring from when I had pneumonia many years ago. I also smoked for 32 years, so it's possibly some of these might be damage from smoking... or they can even be benign growths that grow, but are not malignant.

I was going to say, that they'd probably want to do another scan if they aren't sure about this one... but I see you already have another scan set up for next week. So, I wouldn't be too concerned. What throws them is if they are growing really really slowly. My lung surgeon said that he was almost thinking that my larger lesion might not be cancer because it's growing so slowly. He says it's normal for a malignant growth in the lung to grow 2-3 times it's size in 6 months... and mine has barely grown at all. But they've decided, in my case, that it is cancer because it has lit up the PET scan twice now. But the jury is out on what these small spots are

Huggggggs,

Cheryl