Getting ready, psychologically and logistically for trip to Houston Wednesday. Learned a new term today. What I want, if surgery is indeed the recommended treatment is LIMB SALVAGE (rather than amputation). As odd ball as my cancer is (see next paragraph), limb salvage would put me in the majority of patients treated for a soft tissue sarcoma (STS) in an extremity (80%). This is one of those cases where I want, desperately!, to be a member of the majority!
Here's another tidbit. STS are rare (< 1% of all cancers), which I know I've said, but I've also been saying there are 20 kinds, because I saw a list that long somewhere. Apparently per an article I read today, there are over 70 kinds. The pathologist says mine is a "hybrid" of two relatively infrequent types, so the super odd-ball category. However, also from what I can tell from reading, the treatment for STS on an extremity doesn't seem to differ much based on type. All these different types make good work for pathologists, but may not be so relevant to patients.
Also, for those of you who've asked why I'm having a CT scan (and chest X-ray and MRI) rather than a PET scan, a couple tidbits. First, the tumor is gone. PET scans are good at differentiating between slow and fast growing (i.e. cancer) cells, once the patient has a baseline of which are which. W/o the baseline, it's hard to distinguish between the cells that are left. Second, there's a medical paper concluding that doing PET scans at the diagnosis stage for STS doesn't help in the long run choosing treatment (which mostly involves surgery to remove the tumor w/ a wide, safe margin).
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