Monday, December 29, 2008

Liver Update, Surgery Planned

The palliative care doctor who's taken over my case while my regular oncologist is away came to our house today. She came to examine me and talk about the liver ultrasound result.

She said the scan showed the largest tumor from the previous scan has grown from 3.8 to more than 4 cm, but she couldn't tell me anything about whether the number of lesions has increased or by how much. She also said the fluid in my lungs has increased. I'm not sure how they could tell that from a liver ultrasound, but there it is. These are just preliminary results so we might get more details later.

Meanwhile, the doctor suspects that although it's the liver causing most of my problems, I also have an inflamed gall bladder that may be exacerbating the pain and nausea. So I'm going to have the gall bladder removed.

But because I've lost so much weight lately, the surgeon is afraid I may not be strong enough to withstand the surgery, so they've now put me on a course of antibiotics to help the inflamed gall bladder settle so I can eat and put on some weight before I get the surgery. So I guess I'm like the Christmas turkey - they're fattening me up before they cut me open.

I'm just happy we finally have a course of action. There's nothing worse than sitting around in limbo, waiting to feel better without being able to do anything to actually make that happen. So that's the plan for now.

2 comments:

Will said...

Eat ice cream. Lots of ice cream. And cake. And a whole loaf of french bread. As a sign of my love, I'll be munching away over here in NYC and thinking fattening thoughts. xxx Will

Anonymous said...

My mum who died of breast cancer with mets to liver had had her gall bladder removed shortly before her cancer diagnosis. Her liver was fine at that stage. The inflammed gall bladder did make her feel very ill and she also lost a lot of weight.

MAM