One of the assistants in the radiotherapy department did me a favor. Last week I gave him a USB flash drive, and he put a bunch of images on that drive of my various scans. I got the USB flash drive back this morning.
Mostly, I was curious. Now, I have a lot of images – 2 full CT series (before and after), my pre-surgery MRI, my pre-surgery PET, and a “plan” image from the radiotherapy planning software.
To be honest, my lack of training is quickly manifest. I have no idea what I’m looking at. I can’t really even find my tumor in the “before” pictures. I have a guess, though. Here’s image 49 from my June 28th CT. See the bulge on the left side of my tongue (right side of image because it’s oriented “looking up the body”)?
I added a red circle to where I think the tumor is. I could be totally wrong – I didn’t talk to the doctor directly about these images. But that bulge is slightly lighter in color and missing on the other side of my tongue. It matches to where I understood the tumor to be.
Here is a picture from the pre-radiotherapy “plan.” I think it’s based on a pre-surgery scan, so you can see a red oblong encircled area on the left side of my tongue area, again, and a sort of dark spot which I wonder might be a false-color selection of the tumor area.
You can see where they’ve highlighted with lines and enclosing shapes the areas of soft tissue where they will go cancer-cell hunting with their ray-gun. It’s all very interesting. I wish I could be looking over their shoulders in the control booth when they drive the zap-o-matic.
