October 12, 2006
Read “remove part of my colon” surgery. Ugg. The cancerous tumor was big enough that my appendix and a section of my ascending colon (on the right side) had to be removed.
While you won’t get a lot of chatter out of him, Dr. Cline is a great surgeon. He didn’t say so, but I found out from the oncologist, Dr. Yoffe, via Dr. Cline’s report, that he took out a large tumor that had overtaken my colon and a couple fatty nodules outside it. He also took out 20 (!) (UPDATE: 31!) lymph nodes, and marked the abdominal wall with some kind of metal marker. The good news is that he said he got “everything he could see”, and none of the lymph nodes came back positive. But it is still a ‘stage 4’ cancer, because it had jumped outside the affected organ and infected other areas (the fatty nodules). So even though I officially have stage 4 cancer, the oncologist hopes that no disease will actually show up on the CT and PET scans he will do once I am healed from the surgery. Then it’s on to chemotherapy and radiation to prevent it from coming back. The newer drugs have more tolerable toxicity and it doesn’t sound like it’s going to actually be that bad.
Previous | Home | Next