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