Another Member of the Care Team!

It turns out that the faint image on the latest studies is indeed a cancerous lesion that needs attention. I got to see the pictures during my visit with Dr. Chang on Monday. Compared to “the three brown blobs” that appeared last October, this looks like a faint shadow. It is no wonder that the PET scan had a hard time defining the image last month, we now have a better understanding of what I face.

The most wonderful news, without being PollyAnna, is that I know the doctor whose work I’m going to describe. We serve his clinic professionally, and I’ve had a few conversations with him about “non work” stuff in the past, too. Radiologists no longer just slide an X-ray film into one of those viewers we’ve all seen on TV and rub their chins. Many of them perform a variety of procedures to “intervene” medically and change things.

Anyway, what Dr. Pfeister will do after the anesthesiologist puts me to sleep is insert a probe of some type through my abdominal wall to the liver. This lesion is on the outside, front of my liver at about the crevice that divides the two lobes of the liver in the front. (That’s called the falciform ligament, for those of you attending nursing school…) Don’t ask me how Dr. Pfeister will know how to find the bad guys and leave the good guys there, that’s why we have really fancy medical schools and really bright guys who attend them. The reason a radiologist does this is because he needs imaging guidance to find the right spot. If it wasn’t happening to me, I’d love to watch him guide the probe and zap the little devil.

This will happen in the next month, depending on how fast Dr. Pfeister feels is appropriate. Certainly it is not life-threatening at this point nor urgent. I'll follow his advice and get it done as soon as he feels is appropriate.

In conversation with Dr. Chang, I compared this procedure a bit to the surgical removal I had 30 months ago. “Would there be a reason to do more chemotherapy following this procedure, like we did following the surgery?” At this stage, that is not indicated. We’ll move forward with regularly scheduled tests. We’ll have the Erbitux Artillery in our back pocket should internal tumors erupt elsewhere. We know it works well for me but it hammers my other health systems.

Unfortunately, we all need to recognize that this will be my lot in life. We'll hope nothing new crops up, and deal with whatever may show up if/when it does. I had an interesting trip to the doc’s office. I shared the elevator with a young woman about Vickie’s age, completely locked into a spinal external fixator. You know the kind, where a rack is built around one’s head, anchored to both their skull and shoulders. She looked great, and yet I didn’t really want to start a conversation to compliment her on her mobility. As I stood there quietly, proud of her courage and lack of embarrassment, I was trying to decide who was actually the most ill. She appeared to be in sad shape but probably is doing quite well and has a great prognosis. I look far better, but actually may be sicker and needing more attention than she.

It was a great reminder that all of us face challenges, some of them visible and some of them not. Some are great challenges, immense and serious, while others at times may seem superficial. I’m not describing this latest news as either immense, nor superficial. I’ll just get the work done. As you’ve heard before, I’ll “Just Keep Playing!”

Frankly, I've spent a year learning about hepatic function, geography and terminology, and I'm ready to get back on the History Channel instead of MDTV. But I'll be ok, because I have terrific folks backing me up and listening to me rant from time to time.