We finally got the radiology report! Pretty good news.

After several phone calls and a ten-day wait, we finally got a faxed copy of the radiology report. And we THINK it's good, but it's really pretty darned encrypted, apparently in the radiological language equivalent of Klingon.

Disappointingly, it was really, really, really short, as in two small paragraphs, so we aren't brimming with detailed information. But the dearth of info might be because a CT scan of just the abdomen (which is what Bill had) doesn't give anywhere near the amount of info as one would get from a whole-body detailed MRI.

But it's SOMETHING! And at least it SEEMED good to us, although I'm still googling at Nascar speeds through all the terms, trying to figure out if the report is really as good as it seems.

They don't give stages, and they don't tell about invasions, if any, and they don't tell what kind of tumor it is.

But they DO go through the major organs in the abdomen and tell what they see. (For you English majors, it's all written in passive voice, which gives the impression of great legal timidity on the part of the radiologist--like he doesn't want to commit to whether he actually was or wasn't there while he was reading the scan. "No upper intestine lesion is observed." "No aneurysm is identified.")

Anyway, what you want is not my nonsense.

So here's the summary:

He did see the "mass in the dome of the bladder. Malignancy to be excluded." At first we thought that meant they were excluding malignancy, but then we realized he means that a biopsy is the only way to determine malignancy. (That gave us a happy thrill though for about 30 seconds.)

He did find two cysts, one in the liver and one in the kidney. That would scare you at first, but he writes that they are "circumscribed and nonenhancing" and my reading on those two words has been nothing but comforting, so I don't think he suspects trouble.

He also found an "arteriosclerotic calcification adjacent to the uncinate portion of the pancreas" which sounded freaky, but my googling leads me to believe that's just that Bill has plaque in an artery near or against the pancreas.

He also doesn't "identify suspicious retroperitoneal adenopathy" or "pathologic pelvic adenopathy" which I'm pretty sure means nothing spooky going on in Bill's peritoneum/pelvic area. HUGE relief!

The scariest part of the report was where they repeated what the urologist wrote, before the radiologist gave his opinion lower down on the page. The urologist wrote "large necrotic tumor near dome of bladder, questionable adenocarcinoma of bladder with possible extension into wall of bladder. Left renal (kidney) cyst." On his other report, the urologist wrote, "Very suggestive of possible urachal involvement."

If anyone thinks they could help in some way (or if it would help you in some way) if they had a full copy of the radiology report or the urology report, let me know, and I'll ask Bill if it's okay to send it to you.

We'll know more after our visit to Duke this coming Tuesday, the 15th. I'll post before then if we find out more, too.

Thank you beyond all words for your emails and cards and sweet phone calls and everything else! We'll write back very soon. Right now, we're just calming ourselves from ten horrible days of looking down the barrel of a big, big shotgun, and thanking heaven for all the ways the shotgun situation now seems so much better than it could have been.

Asteroid showers of love to each one of you for caring about dear Bill.