Todays Doctors Visit October 27th

Today I went to talk to the oncologist about next steps.
the next step was a Bone marrow biopsy to determine the staging of the disease.(I had this done today) On Tuesday Nov 3rd I go in for the PET scan and will get the results from both of these tests next Thursday Nov 5th.

OK, so if you imagine behind this stuff a mass the size of a mans fist is pushing on all of these other organs. (That's part of why I hurt)

The good news is with early detection (I believe that is my case) the 5-year survival rate for those patients with a favorable prognosis was 91 to 98%

Prognosis

(good I think)

Treatment of Hodgkin's disease has been improving over the past few decades. Recent trials that have made use of new types of chemotherapy have indicated higher survival rates than have previously been seen. In one recent European trial, the 5-year survival rate for those patients with a favorable prognosis was 98%, while that for patients with worse outlooks was at least 85%.^[3]

In 1998, an international effort^[15] identified seven prognostic factors that accurately predict the success rate of conventional treatment in patients with locally extensive or advanced stage Hodgkin's lymphoma. Freedom from progression (FFP) at 5 years was directly related to the number of factors present in a patient. The 5-year FFP for patients with zero factors is 84%. Each additional factor lowers the 5-year FFP rate by 7%, such that the 5-year FFP for a patient with 5 or more factors is 42%.

The adverse prognostic factors identified in the international study are:

• Age >= 45 years
• Stage IV disease
• Hemoglobin <>
• Lymphocyte count <>
• Male
• Albumin <>
• White blood count >= 15,000/µl

Other studies have reported the following to be the most important adverse prognostic factors: mixed-cellularity or lymphocyte-depleted histologies, male sex, large number of involved nodal sites, advanced stage, age of 40 years or more, the presence of B symptoms, high erythrocyte sedimentation rate, and bulky disease (widening of the mediastinum by more than one third, or the presence of a nodal mass measuring more than 10 cm in any dimension.)

From Wikipedia.org

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hodgkin%27s_lymphoma