PET Scan

On Thursday during our appointment with Dr. Sklow (the surgeon), cancer was found in Curtis' inguinal nodes. Originally we were told that it looked like the cancer had spread there both during and after his chemo/radiation treatment. The mortality rate with colorectal cancer with spread to these nodes is very high. After speaking to Curtis' radiation oncologist, Dr. Anker, he thinks that the cancer may have just grown there and not necessarily spread. These nodes were not in the original field of radiation because they did not show in the PET scan from January. It is possible that there was a small amount of cancer cells in these nodes and they were not detected during the initial PET scan. If this is the case, there may be an option to do additional radiation on those nodes and do the surgery later. The surgery has been cancelled for now. The PET scan takes about 2.5 hours, so we should have more info by 11am today. I will update as soon as I can. Thanks for everyone's support during this extremly difficult time.

The body has between 500-700 lymph nodes. Here is a picture of where they found the new cancer growth.