They said it was more accurate, but I'm skeptical. The PET scan would have been a Choline PET scan at that time (PSMA is more accurate). On the other hand, the report from the MRI showed they'd gone through my body with a very fine toothed comb, and picked up every niggling little thing, about half of which I knew about, and the other half I didn't. There was nothing serious.
I was really intrigued by my full body scan. It stopped above the knees and excluded the arms (if I'd known I would have tucked my arms in closer to my body to get them in). I got the imaging, and spent many hours looking through my body in 3mm slices, and found it fascinating. It's on my laptop, and various other people have found it fascinating too, even my GP! When I next saw my oncologist, I said I was very interested in the MRI scan, and would it be possible to go through it in detail with someone who could explain it, just out of interest? He said the radiologists are always complaining they never see their patients from the outside, and the consultant who reported on it would love to meet a patient, so he fixed it up for me to do so. My oncologist wanted to come too, but in the end, he couldn't make it.
The consultant radiologist went through the scan with me as he had done originally to report on it. He starts at the top of the skull, and works down very methodically. He's looking at the bone and the soft tissues. I asked him about some of the things he reported on, such as a few white matter signal anomalies in a couple of parts of the brain. He said they are TIAs (mini strokes), and I had significantly fewer than they normally find in someone of my age, so nothing to worry about. He'd commented on some of my vertebra disks being dehydrated in the report, and this explains my back-ache when I first wake up (I didn't think it was prostate cancer, but it's nice to know). One vertebra shows differently, but he could tell it was a fat deposit in the bone, not a met.
One of the comments in his report really amazed me. He commented that my breast gland tissue didn't match on each side. He hadn't known, but I'd been on bicalutamide and got breast gland growth, and so had started taking Tamoxifen. This reversed the breast gland growth, and it so happened that when I had the MRI, it had almost completely gone on one side but not yet on the other, and he'd noticed that. I told him the reason when I saw him. I also told him my liver didn't like the tamoxifen much and had pushed up my ALT level, and given this, he could get his imaging software to calculate the fat content of my liver in the image. It was 8% and should be 5%, so yes, the Tamoxifen was giving me a mildly fatty liver, which was the cause of the raised ALT level. It was fascinating to tie together all these loose ends, and both he and I loved doing the session, and I felt very privileged. (This was all on the NHS, not private.)
It's less likely, but not impossible, possibly due to there being a tiny amount of higher grade which wasn't picked up. Generally, they use the risk level to decide the likelihood of micro mets, and that factors in initial PSA, gleason grade, and staging, not just the gleason grade.
Edited by member 16 Jan 2021 at 16:32
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