The Scoop on the Down Low

Today we saw Dr. Chang, the medical oncologist. We know a little more than we did before, but not much. The CaT scan last week doesn't indicate any metastatic indicators, but we are waiting on a comparison between the CaT scan last week at St. Vincent's with the CaT scan in December at Meridian Park. Dr. Chang is still concerned about some visible "hot spot" nodes in the Meridian Park CaT scan. He wants to see what has happened with these when they compare the two.

Here are some possible scenarios:

1) If the nodes are smaller or gone: We will assume these nodes also may be cancer and that they responded to the low dosage of Chemo I was on during radiation. We will do surgery on the local tumor in the rectum and remove it. Then will do aggressive Chemo treatment to make certain all possible peripheral cancer is taken care of.

2) If the nodes are the same (this sounds like the best): They may or may not be cancer, but hoping not. Still, will do surgery and Chemo, same as above just to be sure.

3) If the nodes are larger: We will assume they are cancerous. We will re-evaluate the wisdom of having surgery at this point because if there are other growing tumors we would need to weigh the risk of having surgery with the risk of leaving the local tumor there for a while and seeing how it responds to heavier dosage of Chemo along with the other tumors. In other words, if we were certain there were other growing cancers, we would not necessarily do surgery because once the genie is out of the bottle and growing, it may not make sense to go through the pain of surgery at this time.

It sounded like because the second CaT scan didn't indicate metastatic evidence, Dr. Chang was leaning toward option #1 or #2 above. Long term, these are better because they give a chance at cure rather than just treatment.

I have to reschedule the appointment with the surgeon, hopefully for later this week or next week. We want to have the CaT scan comparison in his hands so he can also help us make judgment.

At this point, it seems like a surgery would be possibly 4-6 weeks from now...so around mid-May (happy birthday to me :) We are still very uncertain exactly how involved the surgery will be and how long it will knock me down for.

I'm feeling pretty well now and have lost a little weight, so that's good. Trying to be more active and get stronger in the next 4-6 weeks will be important!

The side effects from radiation are about 90% healed I'd say, but the skin feels different from the old...it's smoother and, well, just different. Hopefully it continues to heal and get back to normal.

That's all for now...see ya!