Anita.......The blood work being done is to look for cancer markers that identify if something is wacky in the body....cancer. I think. I forgot to mention that I also saw my RAD oncologist every quarter for about a year after i finished treatment. I was more than happy the day my oncologist gave me the six month check up routine. It put my life on a more even keel not having to worry about the CT scans ect. It felt like I'd just get over one CT scan, have a week or two without worry and then it was time again for the next quarterly scan. Three months goes by quickly; six months is a bit more doable in terms of anxiety and worry. Sincerely, Donna

In my case the blood work was to look at white and red cell counts see look for anemia and how my immune system is doing.

Treatment related blood work is one issue...as various poisons, (radiation and chemotherapy), alter our bodies in negative ways. A look at your blood is a look at the physical system overall, and how well it is tolerating the treatment. This type of blood work has little to do with disease. Then there are tests which identify infectious agents, or the process of immune response to infections, both viral and bacterial. These either find the agent itself or show irregular proportions of the normal elements of the blood, the most obvious being white cells and other macrophages, which indicate that an immune response to something is going on. What that response is to, isn't specific, but that something is happening and your body is responding to it, is something that becomes evident, by looking at the balance of normally occurring elements of the blood. But in the realm of cancers, they are usually looking for tumor-associated antigens, or tumor specific antigens (TSA's). Some TSA