We had our first visit with Nick's oncologist, Dr. Koc, today. The PET scan showed that he has stage IIA-non bulky disease. The stage II part means that he has tumors in both his chest and his neck, but not anywhere below the diaphragm, like the inguinal nodes or the liver or or spleen. The A means that he has no systemic symptoms, like fever, night sweats or weight loss. The non-bulky part means that the tumors in his chest are not too large. All of that is good news. He also had a bone marrow biopsy done, but the doctor told us that he really does not expect to find any cancer in the bone marrow. Dr. Koc told us that Hodgkins frequently starts in chest and then travels to the neck, so this is as good as we could have hoped, staging-wise. Treatment is 4 cycles of ABVD (chemotherapy) followed by radiation. Each cycle is 28 days long and he will receive the ABVD on days 1 and 15 of each cycle. His first chemo day is December 17.