Today's appt.

Eric met with Dr. Hansen today, he informed us that Eric is a difficult case (we already knew that :0) When we arrived we were informed that Eric's pathology results are still not complete. The pathologist believes that Eric has Hodgkin's disease, they are leaning towards "Mixed Cell Hodgkin's", but they are unsure. They said that the results don't completely match the "fingerprint" that Hodgkin's often has so they are having someone complete a second opinion. We should know more about that next week (where have we heard that before?)

In the meantime they have scheduled him for a PET CT tomorrow (a good explanation of what this is can be found here :PET Scan: PET Scans and Cancer.) Next week he will have a MUGA scan (to test the function of the heart), and he will have a port-a-cath placed in his chest which will help facilitate his chemo treatments. He will also need to have a bone marrow biopsy done, this is the only way to determine with certainty that he does not have stage 4 cancer.

The doctor did a physical exam of Eric & said he believes based on that exam that Eric is in Stage 3, and beginning to show some B symptoms (you can read more about that here Hodgkin's Lymphoma Types: Lymphocytes and Reed-Sternberg Cells), but he is unable to say with certainty until these other tests come back.

Based on all the information we have (and the lack of information we don't) we are anticipating Eric starting chemo in 2 weeks. More on that to come...