Well, Fuck. Again.

Well, Fuck. Again.

Much like my day and post from January when I found out that even though surgery had been successful, the cancer had already returned to my liver, yesterday was a bad day.

I had my PET scan scheduled for 1pm and needed an empty stomach for the scan so hadn’t eaten all morning. I get to my scan, they inject me with the sugar concoction meant to show where the active cancer is through the scan and I wait the hour until it’s fully disbursed throughout my body. We take the scan which itself only lasts about 15 mins. All is good, I leave the medical center.

Since I hadn’t eaten all day and was pretty hungry, I decided to grab some good ol’ Tex Mex. So there I am, about a half hour after my scan, eating my sizzling fajitas when an email from Kaiser comes in – New Test Result From Kaiser Permanente. Surely they couldn’t have analyzed my scan already, right? But what else could it be? And so I open the email, click the link to my online portal and see my scan results.

The report is pretty dry and medical but I see “There are now probably roughly 15 FDG avid metastases scattered throughout the remaining liver, many of which are difficult to
appreciate on low-dose, noncontrast CT. The findings include both
new lesions as well as recurrent uptake around the previously
ablated sites. One of the largest discrete lesions is seen within
the dome at roughly 2 cm…”

And so, seeing that I have 15 fast growing lesions on my liver, I begin to cry into my fajitas. Super fun and cool. I don’t quite understand how Kaiser won’t show me my CEA results until they’re released by my doctor, yet they sent out the results of this scan. Anyway. I’m shaken and freaked the fuck out.

I settle up my bill and drive home. On my way home, I call my oncologist and leave a message with his nurse that basically says “Hey, it’s me, I got the results from the PET scan I just had and if I’m interpreting it correctly, it’s saying I have 15 fast growing lesions on my liver, please call me back ASAP. because I’m freaking out…” as I break down and cry at the end of the message.

In a little bit my doctor calls me back. It is what I thought. It’s bad. If I don’t change anything, he thinks 6 months is a long shot. Even with changes, we’re looking at the beginning of the end here, most likely less than 6 months. I asked him if it’s time to make sure all my affairs are in order and he responded with a somber “Yes”.

And so here we are. I’m going to add back the Oxaliplatin I was on last year before surgery as well as another gene targeting medicine. We’re going to try to balance my desire to live and enjoyable life before I die, not just spend the entire time sick from meds and clawing the walls trying to stave off death just one more day. We’ll keep the intermittent chemo schedule for this summer that is based around my travel and see how this all goes.

This news all sucks and I’m still not ready to die. But as long as I can get around and do things, I will absolutely be doing things. There are more good times and fun experiences to be had. And I intend to do them all while I can, whether that is 2 months, 6 months or by some miracle, longer.

I’ll try to keep everyone as updated as I can and you can probably count on some rantings/diatribes here over the coming weeks/months, haha.

Love to you all, thank you all so much for your support throughout this hellish, bullshit ordeal.

Matt