TOTALLY GEEKED!

Happy dance time folks!  Here is the rundown.

So as you know I was diagnosed with stage four cancer, metastasized to my liver. That was november 2015. They cut out the original cancer as well as about 18 of lymph nodes that were riddled with cancer and the put me on a chemo treatment every other week to try to get rid of the three spots on my liver. The original plan was that once the three tumors in my liver were taken care of, THEN they would do full on radiation in my gut area to make sure to get any remaining cancer cells that might be holdover from when the colon cancer was there. After that, I would have a final surgery to a) get a hysterectomy and b) to put my plumbing all back together.

July 2016 I had liver radioablation done to see if we could heat burn out the tumors entirely. They are only about a centimeter in diameter right now, so we were hopeful. The only downside to the radioablation is that on a CT scan, you cannot really tell the difference between 'scar' tissue from the ablation and actual bonafide 'cancer' spots. So, to be on the safe side, we continued with chemo every other week. June 12th will be treatment number 39. Yes... 39 times doing chemo.

Back when this plan was first put into place though, we thought this would be about a 3 or 6 month process from start to finish. It wasn't. Chemo kept going on and on, and the tumors acted real slow to shrink. So now, a year and a half later, we asked the oncologist, "hey... no cancer is showing up ANYwhere else on the CT scans, my cancer marker numbers went from 12 to .2, and the spots on my liver are not really doing anything."(cancer? scar tissue? we don't know.)

"Being that it is impossible to know for SURE that they ARE tumors... is there any reason we cannot assume they are NOT tumors? Could we perhaps do a PET scan and consider moving forward with doing the hysterectomy and putting the plumbing back together?"

So, the tumor board all got together last friday and talked it over. The oncologist, the radiologist, the surgeon, and the ablation expert, they are all under the same agreement that after a year and a half of chemo and no occurrence of cancer anywhere else in my body, numbers are what are considered "normal" level, and as long as the PET scan shows nothing new, I WILL GET TO STOP TREATMENT AND MOVE FORWARD WITH MY FINAL SURGERY!

Lets all do the snoopy dance!!!!!