Here's an email he sent out to everybody last night:
Well, I had an appointment with my doctor today, and here's the news.
I finished my 4 cycles of treatment a couple weeks ago. Last week, I had CT-scans of my chest/abdomen/pelvis and of my head/brain. I found out today that the CT-scans showed no cancer in my head (which I'm glad I now know, for my own piece of mind, because they didn't scan my head in the beginning), and that the tumors in my lungs are dead. YAY! And the enlarged lymph nodes in my abdomen that were near my aorta haven't totally gone down to normal size, but have reduced in size. He believes this could be due to scar tissue buildup in the lymph nodes. So he's not concerned about that. But I'm not out of the woods just yet, unfortunately.
There are a couple of concerns still present before he says I'm clean. first off, there's a bit of fluid buildup in my right lung. He's going to have me do a PET-scan to get a better image of what's going on in there. It could be that I had a lung infection during treatment that nobody was aware of, or something else. He said usually if cancer is going to spread, it creates a lump or mass somewhere. But he wants to be sure about it, so we're going to investigate the fluid buildup. Secondly, there's 2 biomarkers which they monitor the levels of for my type of cancer. There were 3 tests taken during the course of my treatment. One of the markers, Beta-HCG, went down from 10 at the beginning to <2 at the 2nd and 3rd testings. But, the other marker, Alphafetalprotein (AFP) started at ~12, went down to 10, but came back up to 13.4. He's puzzled as to why one biomarker went down and the other stayed up. There's a chance that alcohol can give a false reading to the testing. Well, I've 'consumed' alcohol at points during the treatment, so who knows if it affected the levels or not. And I've also drank some wine from time to time to help boost my blood cell production. So it's hard to say what that means. They took another blood sample and we'll see where I'm at right now (last test was earlier this month).
So yeah, that's the update. Good news for the most part, but I can't get back to normal just yet. But it's better than hearing, "The cancer's still there".
I'll take it.
~Roger
Our uncle makes his own red wine using his old-world Hungarian recipes and techniques, and doesn't use any artificial ingredients, so it's as clean and healthy as you can get anywhere. It's really strong flavorful wine, and takes a bit to get used to, but is very healthy for the body. We started giving him just a dixie cup worth every few days or so, as long as his stomach was steady. So aside from the wine, he had maybe three or four beers along the way. Nothing to panic or worry about, cuz that's hardly enough to affect the treatment. If he was doing hard liquor regularly like an alcoholic, then the doc would raise questions, but he was comfortable knowing they were just a very infrequent drink.
Also, later on last night our neighbor talked to her nurse friend who works in cancer stuff. She said a lung infection could be the cause for the off-target biomarker reading. That's a decent reason why his ribs still hurt. But we just need to get that examined, and then he should be able to get back to work and live normally.
But man oh man... it's such a better situation than worrying that the chemo didn't have any effect. Cuz it did! And now we're in a much better position.
Just a little longer....
Well, I had an appointment with my doctor today, and here's the news.
I finished my 4 cycles of treatment a couple weeks ago. Last week, I had CT-scans of my chest/abdomen/pelvis and of my head/brain. I found out today that the CT-scans showed no cancer in my head (which I'm glad I now know, for my own piece of mind, because they didn't scan my head in the beginning), and that the tumors in my lungs are dead. YAY! And the enlarged lymph nodes in my abdomen that were near my aorta haven't totally gone down to normal size, but have reduced in size. He believes this could be due to scar tissue buildup in the lymph nodes. So he's not concerned about that. But I'm not out of the woods just yet, unfortunately.
There are a couple of concerns still present before he says I'm clean. first off, there's a bit of fluid buildup in my right lung. He's going to have me do a PET-scan to get a better image of what's going on in there. It could be that I had a lung infection during treatment that nobody was aware of, or something else. He said usually if cancer is going to spread, it creates a lump or mass somewhere. But he wants to be sure about it, so we're going to investigate the fluid buildup. Secondly, there's 2 biomarkers which they monitor the levels of for my type of cancer. There were 3 tests taken during the course of my treatment. One of the markers, Beta-HCG, went down from 10 at the beginning to <2 at the 2nd and 3rd testings. But, the other marker, Alphafetalprotein (AFP) started at ~12, went down to 10, but came back up to 13.4. He's puzzled as to why one biomarker went down and the other stayed up. There's a chance that alcohol can give a false reading to the testing. Well, I've 'consumed' alcohol at points during the treatment, so who knows if it affected the levels or not. And I've also drank some wine from time to time to help boost my blood cell production. So it's hard to say what that means. They took another blood sample and we'll see where I'm at right now (last test was earlier this month).
So yeah, that's the update. Good news for the most part, but I can't get back to normal just yet. But it's better than hearing, "The cancer's still there".
I'll take it.
~Roger
Our uncle makes his own red wine using his old-world Hungarian recipes and techniques, and doesn't use any artificial ingredients, so it's as clean and healthy as you can get anywhere. It's really strong flavorful wine, and takes a bit to get used to, but is very healthy for the body. We started giving him just a dixie cup worth every few days or so, as long as his stomach was steady. So aside from the wine, he had maybe three or four beers along the way. Nothing to panic or worry about, cuz that's hardly enough to affect the treatment. If he was doing hard liquor regularly like an alcoholic, then the doc would raise questions, but he was comfortable knowing they were just a very infrequent drink.
Also, later on last night our neighbor talked to her nurse friend who works in cancer stuff. She said a lung infection could be the cause for the off-target biomarker reading. That's a decent reason why his ribs still hurt. But we just need to get that examined, and then he should be able to get back to work and live normally.
But man oh man... it's such a better situation than worrying that the chemo didn't have any effect. Cuz it did! And now we're in a much better position.
Just a little longer....
