Monday 2 April 2012

Oncologist Appointment 28 March

I saw the oncologist last week. It has taken me a while to make "a positive" of what he told me. The good news is that I am not having chemo as I did after the last bowel operation - so I get to have a summer without feeling rubbish with the side effects. The reason for no chemo is that the only drug that they can give me post op is the same as I had last year and as the cancer came back it did not work in my case. I knew this because why did it not kill off the cancer that developed in my liver.

The thing is that there is no alternative chemo drug that they can give me at this time.

There is a  60 to 70% chance the cancer will come back - which also means that there is a 30-40% chance it won't - but I had to say this to him!

The plan going forward  is that I will be aggressively scanned  which means a CT scan and a blood test every 6 months. If anything is picked up from these then a decision has to be made about the right course of action. If it is a single tumour that is operable then they cut it out. If I develop multiple tumours then we have to see what chemo drugs can be used to shrink them and hope that they work.

So as you can see the message wasn't brilliant and not what I was expecting. I have now got my head around this. I have taken some positive messages out of the news. No one knows what is happening in my body. We won't know until a scan shows  that there is no cancer or if there is something then we deal with it.

My first scan will be in 4 months time. So as I have to live my life from scan to scan as millions of cancer patients, survivors (whatever you decide to call yourself) around the world. I need to make sure that when I am treatment free, that I do all the things I want to do and live my life and maintain a positive attitude as this also has an impact on your health.

My next scan is in August so I am busy planning what I want to do in the next 4 months.  I am off to The Penny Brohn Cancer Care in Bristol again this afternoon (Monday 2 April) for 3 days and I will get some more guidance and help with making sense of  all this. They provide excellent support on living with and beyond cancer. I have some questions that I need some help with as I continue to live  my life with cancer.

I am now once again very positive after a small blip and got over my annoyance with the oncologists delivery of my prognosis - I feel that he could have been more helpful.

I have got myself back to where I was when I was on holiday and I feel in good health and am told that I look very well.

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