Most Fridays at 9:00 a.m. the oncologists and radiologists get together to discuss their latest patients and come up with ways to treat them (it's called "Planning Clinic"). Dr. G and I went to the auditorium today (I saw Dr. A and he waved hello), but in lieu of a planning clinic, we had the chief medical officer of a pharmaceutical company called Tragara talk to us about the development of a COX-2 inhibitor that can be used to improve survival rates in certain lung and pancreatic cancers. Being a molecular bio major, I was used to seeing and interpreting the many charts and statistics included in the presentation, but when Dr. G was paged to read a mammogram, she never returned to the auditorium. Later she told me that all the research findings were way over her head and she didn't understand them well. Makes sense; radiologists don't need to know about the latest advances in cancer drugs like the oncologists do.
Later we were called to the PET scan prep area (where patients are given some tagged glucose and told to rest for 45 min before the scan) because a patient was "having a reaction." When we saw the patient, he was sitting in the chair with sweat covering his entire face, and he did not look comfortable at all. His blood sugar was 89, but he was also a diabetic who hadn't had anything to eat for over 12 hours. The techs tried to give him orange juice but he complained that his stomach hurt, so they tried a piece of chocolate bar instead. Apparently that did the trick, because by the time a nurse practictioner and an oncologist came downstairs to see him, he felt much better and wanted to proceed with the scan. Apparently this was his first bout with hypoglycemia. Dr. G wondered why he didn't keep any sugary snacks on him in case this should happen, but I think he's learned his lesson.
Normally after injecting a patient with glucose they're supposed to stay still for up to 45 minutes so that their muscles don't use glucose (we only wanted the essential organs and tumors to uptake the glucose), but because he didn't move much, the scan was pretty good. And we soon found out what his problem was: his entire stomach lit up on the PET scan. It turns out he had a giant cell lymphoma of the stomach and the stomach wall was extremely thick. No wonder he had abdominal pain! Fortunately, said Dr. G, some stomach lymphomas can be treated with the same drugs used to treat H. pylori, so maybe he'll be spared from chemo (not too likely with the size of his tumor though). We called Dr. J to the room to see the scan but he wasn't too impressed b/c he'd seen it already (the patient's oncologist had shown him the CT yesterday). Ah well.
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