First of all, I might need to say this again, since some people seem to still be thinking this, but I am not cancer free.  I am merely tumor free.  It has been nearly two months since I have written a post on here, and that was one in which I promised to write more often.  I’ve had a busy 6-8 weeks and while not wanting to make excuses, it seemed like there was always a reason to wait just a few more days to give everyone a full and detailed picture of what was going on.  Well, now here it is.

I’ve had to switch doctors due to my employer’s insurance changing plans on me.  Over the last month, I’ve started treatment at Kaiser (don’t get me started on that again.  I’m going to be polite about that.) and am under the care of a doctor that seems to know what he’s doing.  I’ve been busy undergoing treatment and testing to bring them up to date on my condition, because apparantly having all of my records of treatments, CT scans, PET scans, x-rays and MRI’s since my diagnosis doesn’t count.  I missed six weeks of treatment because some paper pushing bureaucrat didn’t realize that no treatments equals no surviving.  Being polite, I won’t say anything about this person other than I’m glad they are no longer in a position to do to anyone else what they did to me.

Once I’d gotten my treatments back on track, they kinda kicked my butt a little more than I was expecting.  This could be because I’d been off treatment for so long, but maybe not.  Who knows?

Today, I went to see a surgical oncologist within the Kaiser system who specializes in liver resections.  After hearing what he told me (more on that in a second) I have a decision to make.  Basically, the liver is made up of eight sections.  To do a liver resection, there has to be two sections of liver next to each other that can be left alone and allowed to regrow.  I have two and a half, which by my count puts me in the marginally possible range.  The surgery would be done in at least two parts, and possibly three.  First, the damaged parts that were to remain would be trimmed off, leaving only the healthy tissue to remain, and the arteries/veins leading to the right side of the liver would be blocked off, beginning to kill off the damaged portion of the liver and forcing the healthy sections to grow far bigger than is normal, allowing those (two, maybe three) sections to take over the entire normal liver function.

This seems to me to be a high risk/high reward surgery.  Once the liver is resected, the colon will be removed and I will receive an ileo-ostomy (no bag).  If it fails, I’ll be in liver failure and, if not able to be treated with medications,  my body will begin to slowly shut down.  If this surgery works, it could cure me.  The numbers given to me were not good, but my case is not typical.  Most of these numbers were based on patients older than me who were in poorer basic health.  The best study was done on 700 patients, and after ten years, only about 30 were still alive.  However, most of these people were 60 years or older and that study just counted who was still alive, not what they had died from.  If they died in an accident or had a heart attack, they didn’t differentiate, so they might not have died from cancer.  Don’t you love detailed medical studies???  This is the information that you get when you  have to make a life or death decision.

So, I’m heavily involved in the Relay for Life again this year, and we still need volunteers, so come on if you’re interested.  As part of my duties with that august body of volunteers, I’m informing everybody of some hard numbers, since everyone can relate to those.  The national average of the American female population is approximately 52% (that’s white, black, green, polka dot, chartruese, everyone).  One out of every three women will be diagnosed with cancer (colon, breast, thyroid, whatever) and one out every two men (that’s right, HALF! 50%!) will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetimes.  In a city with a population of 200,000 (hey, Rancho Cucamonga has about 200,000 people!), that equates to roughly 82,732 people.  By current mortality rates, out of that amount, approximately 24,820 will die.  What that means is that you WILL know some one who gets cancer, and you MAY know some one that will die from it.  Spread those numbers out to a national population of 300 million people, and that’s 75 million people who will die.  By contrast, the Centers for disease control in Atlanta, GA are declaring swine flu an epidemic, but swine flu is thought to pose a risk to only 20 million people nationwide.  Kind of sobering, isn’t it?

It’s been kind of hard to sleep with those types of numbers running around my head all the time, and it’s been a few days since I actually sat down and crunched some of those numbers.  All those numbers are almost ten years old.  Granted, the treatments have improved, which improves survivorship, but it’s still not that much better now.  Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States, behind only car accidents in numbers.  It’s just something to think about when you have time. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 2:32 am and is filed under My Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.