Next Up
I am feeling pretty good right now. I’ve started swimming again and I am back up to 40 laps. When I get up past 60, I’ll be back to regular exercise. That’s one of my next set of goals:
- to keep off the weight that I lost – about 10 lbs which I’ve started to gain back - and maybe lose some more
- to get myself really fit – I’m aiming for at least three days during the week for an hour and then another hour on both Saturday and Sunday
- to figure out what I want to do after the operation – try to find another job like my current one (my current contract runs out on February 2nd) and stay in San Francisco or move back to Santa Rose, find a part-time job and semi-retire again – still weighing the options
Met with my surgeon last Monday and we have set the operation for Friday, February 3rd. I will b e in the hospital for a week to 10 days. He’s still pushing for a colostomy instead of a resection and I am still resisting. However,as Robert noted, after we saw the surgeon on Monday, I haven’t had a CT scan yet and I am still swollen enuf from the radiation that the surgeon hasn’t been able to really “see” the effects of the radiation and chemo on the tumor (not just from the CT scan but from the proctology scope) so it’s still early to be making decisions. To use Janie’s very good term, I don’t have enough data points yet and my instinct is to strongly resist. I’ve read a bunch of stuff on the forums for colo-rectal cancer and the acceptance of having a colostomy seems to be quite mixed. Hard to find anything in the forums about not doing the colostomy though. I apparently haven’t found the right search terms yet to get a better reading. So, if any of you know of anyone who’s had to make this decision in the earlier stages of cancer, I’d appreciate it if you could put me in touch with them (e-mail would b e great). I’ll be asking my oncologist that, too.
I meet with my oncologist tomorrow and that will be another interesting discussion. The final lab tests on my missing enzyme have come back and they show a severe deficiency in the enzyme, as expected. So that means the normal protocol for post-surgery chemotherapy may not be usable at all. One possibility, of course, is not to do any chemo, but then my surgeon will be even more adamant that he will need to have a bigger perimeter and will be even more likely to want to do a colostomy. He already made that clear. BTW, this surgeon is considered one of the best at what he does in the San Francisco Kaiser organization so asking for a new surgeon is not necessarily a good alternative either. So we will be exploring what the alternatives are to post-operative therapy. One of the reasons we have all of these discussions is that colo-rectal cancer is one of those cancers that has a high rate of recurrence.
Anyway, things are going as well as possible right now. And I am optimistic for the future.
