Update! 8 March 2014. So, those keeping score will know I had a PET scan last Wednesday and will know that the PET scans are used for the drug trial and are not intended to be 'diagnostic' for me (not intended to measure progress or effectiveness of the trial drug, per se). However, the medical staff have been very cool and willing to share with me their observations of these 'other' tests and I had a call from the Lead Fellow yesterday to tell me that, being careful to point out that they were comparing 'PET scan to PET scan' (because to try to compare a PET scan to a CT scan would be pointless as they reveal very different things) they feel I continue to be 'stable', meaning nothing has changed much since the prior PET scan; no return of the pleural effusion (water pocket) that was visible before I started the trial drug but has gone away since, and no new cancer lesions, but at the same time, no notable decrease, either. All along it has been true that one possible 'good' outcome of this drug might be simply that it arrested the progression of my cancer. In any case, I'll take 'stable' over many other possibilities!

I've had a return of some pleural pain this past week, but this now seems to have been caused my the wrong kind of physical activity and is settling down. While annoying, it's not unprecedented, and it's tolerable, and does respond to ibuprofen.

I will have a contrast-enhanced CT scan next week Wednesday and that is intended to be diagnostic, where they will actually try to measure the sizes of tumours etc. and get a quantifiable sense of changes.

ONWARD THROUGH THE FOG!