Phone call from my oncologist at 11 o'clock this morning, and he's also emailed me the radiology report. Scan has come back clear: "No convincing evidence of bony metastatic disease" (which apparently is as far as they're ever willing to commit themselves when it comes to reporting negative findings). I was scanned from eye-level to pelvis and it did find all the other stuff I knew I had wrong with me (which is good) and nothing new (which is even better). Feeling as though the weight of the world has been lifted from my shoulders. I've gone through some pretty rocky times along this journey so far, and I'm sure there'll be other bad days in the future, but this has probably been the worst week of my life, and I've come through it, so feeling utterly drained, but very, very relieved. Maybe now I can catch up on a week's eating and sleeping!
Some slightly less encouraging news about the splenic aneurysm, which was looked at by the vascular MDT on Friday last. 4cm aneurysm only 1.5cm away from my spleen. What they've decided to do is a procedure where they'll try to insert lots of tiny coils into the aneurysm, with the idea that blood will clot around these and completely block it off ("embolyse" was the word he used). Apparently, though, there is a high risk (he wouldn't put a number on it, but I gather it's kind of the expected outcome) that doing this will block off the blood supply to the spleen, resulting in the necessity to remove the spleen (a "splenectomy"). You can live without a spleen, but it makes you more susceptible to infections, since the spleen is an important source of white blood cell production. So, the plan is that I'm to start a 4-week course of being vaccinated against every disease known to man at my GPs, and then at the end of the 4 weeks be admitted to hospital for this procedure to insert the coils. They'll then keep me in for observation. If all goes well, fine. If not, there'll be a surgical team ready and waiting to perform the splenectomy. This would be quite significant surgery. If they open me up to do this, they'll also remove the whole of my left kidney (where the tumour is) at the same time, to avoid having to do two operations. If the process to embolyse the aneurysm is successful, I'd go ahead with the robotic partial kidney removal shortly after.
So, we have a plan! I'm feeling really (unreasonably, in fact!) happy now. And it's looking likely that the prostate cancer is localised, after all, so it all should be fixable.
I feel that this is a turning point in my journey. The first time I've had a scan that hasn't actually shown anything else wrong!
Chris