I'll be missing the holiday parties at work, one happening today and another happening a week from today, in order to spend some quality time with some of the machines and doctors at the hospital. Today I will be catching up with my friends the MRI Brain Imaging Machine and the PET/CT Scan Machine.

In order to prepare to see PET, I have to not have eaten or drank anything in the previous 8 hours. One I arrive at the hospital they take me to this small room completely lined with lead. Once I am seated there, they bring in what appears to be a small bomb, but is really just an injection of radioactive sugars in a big lead box. After introducing the syringe containing the radioactive sugar to my vein, I will be instructed to lay still for about 20 minutes so the sugars will have time to migrate to the parts of my body that are looking to use a bunch of sugar. In addition to my brain and heart, these should include any active tumor sites. Once I am inside the PET scan machine, these will glow brightly with radiation and give the technicians an excellent understanding of which tumors in my body are active and growing.

I am expecting that my upper right lung will be hung like an Xmas tree because I have been feeling lots of pressure and pain coming from this area. In my recent bout with Influenza, I had a very difficult time breathing deeply at all, stemming from the pain in my right lung.

Hopefully my meeting with the MRI machine will be uneventful and my brain will show no signs of new tumor growth. H was pretty lucky to receive the brain radiation therapies when I did, and until now, I have experienced no further tumor growth in my brain. Let's hope that my friend MRI will confirm that today.

Next week I get to skip out on a holiday party to meet with My oncologist, Dr. A. If he confirms my suspicions that the tumor growth has been accelerating in my lung, I will ask him to set up a consultation with a lung specialist, because I can't just surrender my right lung to the weeds. I am not sure if there are any viable treatments for melanoma in the lung, but I want to explore all the options.

In other news on my cancer, I just phoned the Hoag Hospital in California. They are working to grow cell lines from my tumors cells for a clinical trial. The nice woman I spoke to told me that they are still working on my cell lines but they are having trouble with Fibroblasts. She described the situation as Fibroblasts being weeds amongst the tumor cells. They have to remove all the Fibroblasts from the tumor cells, which she described as flowers, in order to get a perfect garden of tumor cells to harvest.

She also mentioned the possibility of going out to California to meet the doctor and become more familiar with the clinical study, possibly in January. An exodus to Southern California in January sounds like a nice break from Minnesota.

Anyway, off to the hospital for my scans.