CT-Guided "Deep Bone" Biopsy

I have to admit that I am far from over the initial shock of having some sort of yet-to-be-defined tumor in my body.  Honestly, the location absolutely sucks!  And as we all know, it's all about location, location, location!

Just do a little Googling of pelvis anatomy and you'll quickly see that this is a veritable junction box for everything waist down.

Now I'm no doctor, but other than your brain, I can't really thing of a worse place for a tumor!  And my particular tumor seems to be involved with many of these major nerves, arteries, and veins.

The real "wake up" call came when I went in for my biopsy.  I really had no idea at all as to how they were going to do this biopsy, just that they needed to do a biopsy.  Once I was there, however, I was told that this was going to be a "deep bone" biopsy.  "Why are you taking something from my bone when the tumor is soft tissue?", I asked.  Their reply was twofold:

1. It is too risky to reach for the soft tissue under only CT-scan guidance.  According to the doctors doing the biopsy, it is not possible to distinguish between nerves, vessels, and soft tissue with just a CT.  I would need an MRI guidance to do that, which takes a very long time.  This, of course, is just more confirmation of how risky it is to operate on that area.
2. "The tumor is involved with your sacrum", says the doctor.  Therefore, we should be able to get tumor cells by taking deep bone samples from your sacrum.  My (unspoken) reaction: "Oh shit, it's in the bone?!?"

Just before they got going with the procedure, they went through their standard "safety checks" (programmers call these "sanity checks") where they confirm who you are and what procedure you are asking them to perform today.  I told them that "they are going to do a very soft and shallow bone biopsy in my right hip area using a tiny needle and that they were going to load me up with plenty of really fun drugs so that I could laugh a lot during the procedure."  They all got a good chuckle out of that one.  ThursDave (inside joke).

I was awake throughout the procedure, having been given only a mild sedative and localized pain killers.  The procedure itself was really quite interesting, especially the conversation between the attending physician (who supervised) and the resident physician (who did the actual work).  There was some drilling, some checking of the scan, some more drilling, some tapping (like with a hammer type instrument), some more verification, a little bit of pain (followed immediately by more scan verification), followed by more careful drilling, tapping, scanning, and finally sample collection.  There was no immediate diagnosis from the pathologist in that room looking at the samples.  I was told it could take a week or more for those results.  My hunch though is I'll know something by Tuesday, 01/22/2019.

I was also told that there was always the chance that they may not have collected any relevant material!  In that case, they would likely follow up with a MRI guided biopsy.

I really love all of the doctors and nurses there at Emory.  They are all so very kind and professional.

Now we play the waiting game to find out what this really is!