My boyfriend was diagnosed with cancer of the tongue in November. He had two lumps on the side of his neck. He had surgery and had them removed, but the doctor said he didn

If I were you, and if I were your docs, I would want to get a further study or two done. I am sure they will want to follow up on this mystery, please let us know what they find out, I am interested, and I am sure most others on this board will be too! Good luck to you both,

Andrea

If your boyfriend had a PET scan only two weeks after surgery, then the areas of activity were most probably healing, inflammation or even infection -- the PET picks up any areas of cellular growth or high metabolic activity, as these cells take up the radioactively-labelled glucose most strongly. False positives are common in PET scans done right after treatment. This does not mean your boyfriend's results, from the first scan, were a false positive but the results of the second seem to point that way.

The advice to have another PET/CT scan (note, a fused PET/CT is considered the best to determine presence of cancer but is still not 100%) is probably a good one, although if there is residual cancer you do not want to wait too long before starting further treatment.

Most CCCs do not do the first PET after treatment for 2-3 months because of the very high risk of "false positives" due to infmallation, healing and infection. Our ENT is rather anti-PET as even at Hopkins with expert radiologists reading the scans, he (and the patient) have had scares that turned out to be nothing.

Gail

Has your boyfriend had a biopsy of the BOT? Even after my PET scan showed activity at the BOT I was glad that my ENT wanted to do a biopsy as well to be sure. There is a saying around here that it's not cancer until the pathology says it is. His nodes were tested, right? I mean that's how they found out they were positive.