Just To Clear Things Up...

I think a bunch of people were confused about the "clear bone marrow" result, and I thought that I would make things clear. When Spence was first diagnosed, they did a bone marrow aspirate and a bone scan. The aspirate tells us if any of the cancer cells from the tumor have spread to his bone marrow. Bone marrow is the spongy tissue in your bones that produce stem cells, some of those stem cells develop into red and white blood cells. That could potential spread the cancer to different parts of the body. His first bone marrow aspirate showed that 25% of his bone marrow was saturated with these rhabdo cancer cells. This is one of the reasons he was a diagnosed with stage 4 rhabdomyosarcoma. It is called metastatic disease, or to say the cancer has metastasized. SOOO, he is supposed to have routine bone marrow aspirates to see how well the chemo is working throughout his body, on all of the cancer cells. So this last one said "clear". They did not see any rhabdo cancer cells in his bone marrow. He still has a tumor. It is shrinking, but still there. He still has cancer, but things are looking up. His body does not have to fight "as much" cancer at this moment. He also had another PET scan this last week. The PET scan shows live cells;cells that are alive. His original bone scan in February showed that he had 3 pin point cancerous spots on parts of his spine, also metastatic disease. We followed up with a PET scan to confirm this diagnosis. We are following up this week to see if there are any improvements on those spots. I am hoping to see that there ARE NO spots. The scan was a full body, and I am extra crossing my fingers that they see some dead tissue, in the scan, on the tumor. That would be joyous. We had a great weekend and a full week. I am working on blogging now. I will be posting a whole bunch these next two days before Nate kidnaps my computer during Spencer's next five day hospital stay (yes Nate is staying with him! I have a break to be with the other kids! HAPPY DAY!).