Thanks again for your very kind notes and phone calls
Yesterday at the doctors office after the word cancer was mentioned, you could have said I won the lottery and I would not have heard it. I actually do not even remember driving home at all, I was on autopilot and wrote that note after only being home for about a half hour, I should have waited a bit.
Well I'm home now after the biopsy and that was not 'too bad', no fun certainly, but they do sedate you quite a bit and it was comfortable so to speak...it probably hurt I just didn't care LOL. After I woke up a bit more I did get to talk to the doctor some more and while he may have mentioned it yesterday, I did not hear that there is a reasonable chance that this is also just a type a giant cell cyst or potentially damage that is left over from a previous infection.
I was lucky that the new facility of Dartmouth Hitchcock (same place you and I see Dr Nagri at Nancy) now has these outpatient services, apparently the wait at the local hospitals for a biopsy can be up to a couple of weeks.
The different imaging modes do help in making the determination but even given all of that, the only way to tell is to get a piece of it under a microscope. While they are quite careful NOT to make guesses or quote odds at this point, he was optimistic.
Now onto the fun techy stuff that a geek loves, they did give me a full set of the latest MRI scans from last week and the software to view them on my PC and the doctor emailed me the images we used to talk about this yesterday with his annotations on them.
Since they are so cool I thought I would share these.
Here is the scans of the lumbar region of the back taken from the side and these are a cross-section taken evenly down the middle of the spine that shows where both issues are. The darker segments are the discs and the lighter colored rectangular segments are the vertebrae.
The green arrows point to what they call Rommas signs (is that name correct Polly?) these brighter corners are indicative of inflammation that's due to anklyosing spondylitis
The yellow arrow shows the area they are checking for cancer.
This image is a slice through the same region but it's taken horizontally like you are looking down from the top of the spine. The yellow arrow points to the region and shows how deep into the bone of the vertebrae the damage extends
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