John: Your scaring me. If I am reading your posts correctly, you have not had any CT/Pet/CT with contrast/MRI scans at all? If that is correct, I would get all of them (at least CT with contrast and PET) immediately. I had chest X-ray, CT scan with and without contrast, PET scans, needle biopsy cell samples and finally sonigram directed needle biopsy before cancer was even confirmed. If I were you I would get them all done and mine were done for the head, neck and entire chest area. Of course, I smoked for almost 40 years so they were very concerned about lung issues.

I do understand, though, the concern about using up all of your radiation. If there is no indication of a tumor, where would radiation occur? Perhaps someone else knows about that. All I know is my radiation and chemo treatments were all directed at a know tumor in the lymph nodes and that there was no other area at which rad was directed. The chemo (ciplaten) was claimed to be able to kill off any cancer cells that had traveled to other locations and were to small to show up on scans. But until you have scans to find any other places that tumors exist, you don't know what to target, at least thats my understanding. So start with the scans.