Our Survey Said...

You're probably wondering why I haven't posted for a bit given that I was going in to get my results on Monday. Well that's because if you remember the old game show "Family Fortunes" it went something like this...

"So your answer was 'It's an easy cancer to fix with surgery and a spot of chemo', our survey said..."


This is me we're talking about here. I don't do straightforward.

You know something is amiss when you turn up for your appointment and the nurse says "OK Who's here to see Mr C" and four of you stand up only for you to be swiftly whisked to one side by Angela, my red-uniformed cancer angel, and lead to a seperate consulting room where you come across Lena, another red cancer angel, who is breaking open several boxes of industrial strength Kleenex.

So after a moment Mr C the guts surgeon rocks up and the first thing he says was "well I'm afraid your scan wasn't clear". I thought that meant they'd got a blurry picture and needed to take it again but apparently this is a new piece of cancer jargon and really means "you've got other stuff"

The "other stuff" turns out to be secondary tumors, or "mets" in the jargon* and they're in the liver. Now apparently this isn't too uncommon but in my case there are several of them and they're spread over both lobes of the liver... here's a liver so you can see what it looks like

Fig 1: The Liver (this bit is bolloxed as well)

It seems that the liver is a very clever thing and as well as tasting great with onions and mash it can repair itself even if you hack 70% of it away, and normally that's what happens with liver secondaries if you've only got the one. Unfortunately that isn't an option for me so they're going to have to try and shrink the mets with chemo first and then see if there's enough liver left to save. And they can't do that right now as they need another biopsy as the first one was "inconclusive" - which either means that the cytology guy get my sample mixed up with his lunchtime yoghurt or they can't work out why a cancer that only affects large fire-breathing reptiles is inside a human (damn my disguise, it's just too good)

They say you should take along a list of questions to these meetings and I did have one but it was all about surgery options and stomas. That list went right out the window when he said "I'm sorry, the bowel cancer isn't operable, I can't cure you with surgery right now." What he can do however is fit a stent around the cancer to keep my colon from blocking and they'll do the second biopsy at the same time. So that's the subject of the next post.

Oh yes I did ask the stupid cancer patient question "How long have I got." They don't answer that any more it seems but the strong steer I was getting was "I wouldn't invest in any ISA products if I were you."




* there will be a test on cancer jargon at the end of the month so do pay attention. Especially you at the back of the class.