Your doctor should allow you any testing you feel you need within reason and frankly, that is within reason. I've had all of those but will tell you that the radiation from the CT is not good for you. The MRI is what I would choose but I've had all of them including PET scans. If you don't feel your doctor is listening to you CHANGE DOCTORS. You are your own best advocate.
Best wishes.
What you do may want to ask for is that they check your tumor marker, and then again after or during treatment, and for years down the line in case you have new symptoms.
by itself, these tests are not adequate, but they are very telling in combination with other tests and should your cancer spread at some point. Your doctors probably figure that as a stage 2 extra scans are neither helpful, necessary not reliable at this time.
correction: microscopic mets, or even other mets, are often NOT detected on those scans, so if they say nothing shows that doesn't mean nothing is there, and therefore not very helpful, or telling?
In my case, I had chemotherapy before surgery.
I didn't have any of those scans done either before I started chemotherapy. Except, I did have an MRI a few days prior to surgery as my surgeon wanted to be sure that no cancerous lymph nodes were were present, as none could be detected by Ultrasound, and none showed up on a previous CY scan, and none could be palpated, or felt by physical examination.
When the MRI showed nothing abnormal, my surgeon was still not satisfied and told me MRI's were notoriously wrong in showing true lymph node status. inspite of the negative test, he still reserved the OP for an extra two hours just in case. it turned out that the MRI was wrong and 15 cancerous lymph nodes were present. so, maybe that is one reason. the other reasons for them not doing these tests you ask for my oncologist explained to me, and your doctors should have also given you a reason rather than just saying 'NO'. (I assume that the reasons between my oncologist's thinking and yours are similar)
It's this. Lets say something shows up, some somts to the kungs, or so? Well, since you are already going to be treated with very heavy duty chemotherapy, it does not really matter if mets are present or not?
But that is not the only reason. The other reason is that if no mets show up on the MRI or CT scan, that does not mean that mets are not present, as microscopic mets, (the smaller ones) are more often than not detected on scans even if they may be there and very aggressive.
Does that make sense? Katrin
Even after treatment, usually routine testing is not done, but only if you have symptoms.