pulmonary emboli (blood clots)

Hey everyone- I wanted to send a note of what I know so far from my PET/CT scan. I don't know yet the final result about the cancer. I do know, however, that they found a couple pulmonary emboli (blood clots) in my lungs (hence pulmonary). This can happen with an abdominal surgery, like I had. We don't know how long it has been there, it may have happened shortly after surgery. My doctor has started me on blood thinners, Lovenox shots for atleast 7 days as well as Coumadin, which I will probably be on for about 6 months or more. They will be monitoring my PT (Protime or clotting level) fairly frequently. I am on "bedrest/low activity" for a few days, so I don't have to into the hospital, I told him I could do this from home. It is concerning, but I haven't had any symptoms and it is nothing to be too worried about. It is under control.

The scans also showed something in my liver, which did not show up on the PET scan but did show up on the CT scan, they are getting old CT scans so they can compare them to figure out what is going on with that as well as what is going on in my pelvic area. Since surgery, things look pretty messy down there so they aren't quite sure what they are looking at without comparing. I should know more today or tomorrow and will let you all know.

One more thing they saw was some fluid in my pelvic cavity, which is possibly infectious. This could be the source of my low back pain. My nurse practitioner started me on antibiotics (for those medical people out there, we know there is an interaction between them and it is being monitored), so if the pain starts to go away, we know that this was probably the cause. If not, they may have to drain the fluid and culture it to see what it is.

Are you all confused yet? Like I said, this is the initial report, I should know more soon. They did adjust my pain medication, so I am taking a long acting pain medication and short acting as needed for breakthrough pain, that is doing the trick at the moment... I feel gooood! hehe.

That is all for now. I do want to remind all the people that signed up for the crawl with us who have not paid need to get that in ASAP. Doug put a link on the site so you can all go look at the teams. We had enough people I know want to join, so we have two teams of us. For those of you who don't know each other, we are all together on the two teams and I will request that we go around together that day. I will talk to Chris about transportation plans, but I think we might want to find our own transportation from my house so we don't have to worry about driving. If any of you have questions let me know.

I will post more when I get more information and Doug and I are going to work on getting pictures out tonight.

Thanks for staying posted. I am doing okay, just having a hard time staying on "bedrest/low activity". I hope you all are doing well. We are very much looking forward to Easter weekend. I will tell you all more about that later. love always, shawndra