Prostate Cancer Saved My Life. Let Me Explain.

Repeated chest CT and skull-to-thigh PET scans over the past nine months showed no sign of tumors. I'll continue to have scans for the next few years.

My experience puts me in a select group of people lucky to have received an accidental lifesaving diagnosis.

The group includes Griffin, an early childhood educator, infant-family specialist and painter, who lives in Washington and in Calvert County.

In October 2005 and again in June 2006 she underwent CT scans to find why she was having repeated kidney infections. A comparison of the two scans showed that her lymph nodes were "firing" in increasing numbers -- a possible sign of cancer.

A biopsy revealed that she had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma -- a surprise to her and her doctors.

Lymphoma is an idiosyncratic cancer, and a person with a case that's diagnosed early, such as Griffin, has a life expectancy as good with no treatment as with multiple cycles of chemotherapy. She decided against treatment and is now part of a lymphoma watchful waiting group at the National Cancer Institute, while she works to build up her physical strength, believing that fitness works in her favor.

What Griffin took away from her surprise diagnosis is the need to trust her instincts about health concerns and insist doctors take them seriously:

"I had been complaining of fatigue and hot flashes for almost a year before those tests," she said. "I just talked to my doctors and then wrote [my complaint] off to menopause or sloth. It is a lesson for me to be more aggressive when I feel there is something wrong."

In October, Kennedy underwent a routine evaluation of his back and spine, which he has had many times before, related to back injuries suffered in a 1964 plane crash. "MRI studies picked up an unrelated, asymptomatic blockage in the senator's left carotid artery," a statement by the senator's office said.

A few days later surgery was performed to repair the partially blocked artery and prevent a stroke.

Christopher Rothstein, a radiologist with Doctors Groover, Christie and Merritt, a practice in the District and Montgomery County, said similar discoveries occur up to five times a month in the firm's hospital practice, with perhaps two turning out to be serious. That's out of more than 7,000 images per month.

"Recently a patient of ours with a failed colonoscopy underwent a CT scan of his colon," Rothstein said. "The scan unexpectedly revealed a mass outside the colon. It proved malignant.