Hello all, Eric here. It's been a while since I've posted anything. Life is incredibly crazy with my job (that I am trying to change) and with being the father of a one-year-old (which is pretty darn exciting).

I'm now more than two years out from my original diagnosis/surgery and about 14 months out from my last treatment. So far, all of the reports from doctors have been good - no evidence of recurrent cancer. I've had one PET and two MRIs since treatment ended (with the most recent one in February), and all were negative for cancer. I've gained a lot of my weight back, probably too much actually. Other than being tired from working too much, I feel pretty good. Sometimes I even go a day or two without thinking about what I've been through, though I think I still have a lot of things to process that I haven't dealt with yet...

Anyways, I'm wondering if I should get another PET scan sometime in the near future. After my treatments ended in September '04, I moved from Arizona back to my hometown in North Carolina. My new doctor at UNC-Chapel Hill doesn't think it's necessary to get another PET and says he can tell just as much from his manual exams and the yearly chest X-ray/blood test as any scan would show. And, he says, if there is a distant mets, then it's probably incurable anyway, so somehow that's supposed to make me feel better.

On the other hand, my old doctor in Arizona, who called me up out of the blue about a month ago because he was thinking about me and wondering how I was doing, advised getting a PET. Because I'm in my mid-30s and now have a daughter, he advises going with the ultra-aggressive approach even now. He was right about me once before, and his nagging feeling about a questionable lymph node may have just saved my life...

Just curious what others who have been down my path before me have done. Is it a wasted expense to get another PET this far out from treatment, especially considering my doc doesn't see or feel anything in my head and neck everytime he sees me? Or is it a good safeguard that might catch something that could be lurking and that his hands, however skilled, might have missed? I'm leaning toward getting a PET scheduled, but just wanted to talk this out a bit with others. I realize it's still a pretty new proceedure and have already been through one false positive with it before. But it also caught something that a doctor didn't notice by hand.

Thanks for listening and sorry for not stopping by here more often. This site has been such a blessing to me and my family as well. Hope all are well.

Eric