First follow-up MRI report just says "stable, no change". Six months of waiting for THAT?

Gamma Knife last July for a 14mm acoustic neuroma. Six month MRI was on the 2nd, report came through the portal yesterday: "appearances stable, no significant interval change." That's it. That's the whole sentence I waited six months for.

I know nobody promised shrinkage. But some part of me had obviously decided the scan would show the thing visibly dying, and instead it's just... sitting there, same as before. Same size. Now I've got a year until the next scan and I don't know whether to feel reassured or cheated.

Is this what everyone's first report looked like? Did anyone actually see shrinkage at six months?

Three scans into follow-up for a meningioma so I can offer the longer view. My first report actually said "marginally increased in size", which sent me into a two week spiral until my team explained it was almost certainly swelling from the treatment doing its work. Second scan: stable. Third scan, just before Christmas, two years out: "reduced in maximal diameter". Nobody used the word shrinkage until year two.

Stable at six months is the boring good result, honestly. I'd have taken it over my first report in a heartbeat.

AVM patient, so a different beast, but my team told me on day one not to expect anything meaningful on scans for two to three years. The waiting is the treatment, basically. Stable and boring is the goal.

markd58 said:

Now I've got a year until the next scan and I don't know whether to feel reassured or cheated.

This bit I relate to hard. I'm only one scan in myself and the week before it I was useless, couldn't concentrate at work, snapped at everyone. Then the report was fine and I felt flat instead of happy, which nobody warns you about. What's helped me since is booking something good in scan week, we did a long walking weekend right after mine so the scan wasn't the only thing on the calendar. Not a cure but it took the edge off.

A clinical note for this thread, because "stable" causes more unnecessary worry than almost any other word in a follow-up report.

Radiosurgery for a benign tumour like an acoustic neuroma does not remove anything. The aim is control: the dose damages the tumour's ability to grow, and the scan's job is to confirm it has stopped. Stability at six months is exactly the expected finding, any shrinkage tends to appear slowly over one to three years and in a proportion of patients the tumour simply stays the same size, controlled, indefinitely. Paul's experience of early apparent enlargement is also well recognised and usually reflects treatment effect rather than failure. The site's guide to results and follow-up after Gamma Knife walks through the expected timelines for each condition.

What none of us can do here is interpret an individual report, the comparison across your own sequence of scans is what matters, and that reading belongs to your radiosurgery team. If the wording of a report is eating at you, ask them to talk you through it, most centres are glad to.