Alrighty then.

I have to confess something to you, dear readers. I didn’t tell you the whole truth of our doctor’s visit on Wednesday. I left out a big ole’ chunk of information that honestly terrified me too much to tell you about it right away. But I spoke with my regular oncologist today and she helped calm me down quite a bit. So I’m ready to tell you now.

Since day one, the CT scans have shown three of my lymph nodes to be enlarged. Their locations are near my heart and pancreas. All this time, the doctors just wave their hands and causally brush it off telling me only that the lymph nodes may just be inflamed due to the nearby tumor. Well, Dr. Gupta had an entirely different story. On Wednesday Dr. Gupta started saying things like, “Get your affairs in order,” and “If there are things you’ve always wanted to do in your life, now is the time to do them,” and “It’s obviously in your lymph nodes and there is nothing that can be done at that point…we can give you maybe another year to 14 months.” Gee thanks. It got worse. How, you ask could it possibly get worse? Let’s just say that when Honey asked me what the word ‘palliative‘ meant, between sobs, I could only muster enough strength to reply, “It’s usually the very last chapters in all my cancer books.”

So we came home from that appointment, stunned deep to the core of ourselves. We cried a lot and I slept a lot and my head was spinning ever since. I yanked out my latest CT scan report and picked through it word for word. I highlighted the line in the paragraph that refers to the lymph nodes as, “Findings are suspicious for metastases.” Needless to say, we entered today’s visit with Dr. Kane armed and ready to wag our fingers, stomp our feet and demand some better answers.

She immediately set our minds at ease. She reminded us that we’ve always been concerned about the state of those three enlarged lymph nodes and their status hasn’t changed any more than the status of the liver tumor has. When we asked her if we could go in and biopsy the lymph nodes in question to see if they are, indeed infected with cancer, she said that yes we could do so but it wouldn’t really do any good, since we would treat them the same way that we have been treating this all along. Cancer is cancer no matter how small. The sole purpose for the systemic chemo I’ve been on since December is to cover all our bases: let’s flood the body with the chemo and let it set to work on any and all infected areas; be they lymph nodes, liver tumor, or elsewhere we just don’t know about yet. As we learned the hard way back in September, October and November of last year as we tried desperately and repeatedly to find a diagnosis for my pain, it’s not like you can just draw a bunch of blood, run it through a cancer screen and it’ll spit out the results like “YES for BREAST CANCER, NO FOR LUNG CANCER, etc.” It just doesn’t work like that. Case in point: today’s blood tests show everything functioning well and normal; even the cancer tumor markers still don’t show any big fat bright red flags!

Long story short, things are not nearly as grim as Dr. Gupta made them sound. Yes, I still do have cancer. But I’m not the only person that she is treating with cholangiocarcinoma! When I heard this, I almost got excited. I asked if she wouldn’t mind giving my email address and/or phone number to another one of her patients (a 50ish year old woman) so I can talk to her about it. I have a ton of questions and all I can seem to find in my sex and age group are women who have had breast and/or ovarian cancer, or other more hormonal-based cancers. Actually, Dr. Kane told me she has several patients with bile duct cancers similar to mine. HORRAY!!!! I’m not as unique as I thought I was!! There is hope!

She told me there is always hope. She assured me repeatedly that this chemoembolization is by no means a last resort for me. We are still going forward in our attempts to shrink this damned tumor so we can get in there and resect it, at which point we may consider removing those pesky lymph nodes as well. But that’s a ways down the road and I’ve learned to only take one. step. at. a. time.

So here’s the plan: On March 17 in the AM, I go in for chemoembolization and then stay overnight in the hospital (they don’t have visiting hours so Honey’s going to spend the night with me and ya’ll are welcome to come and visit!!!). The next day they send me home to wait out the side effects (flu-like symptoms). Then on the 21st I go back in and meet with Dr. Kane. If I am handling the embolization well, then about two weeks after the procedure, she’s going to put me back on some systemic chemo (probably a different cocktail/mixture than I had before since all that did was STOP the tumor growth rather than shrink it). Although that Phase One Study I talked about earlier in the week is specifically for people with pancreatic and/or cholangiocarcinoma, I am no longer elligable for it because I have had previous chemotherapies. Which sucks but that just means I can’t take the particular study drug in question. I can, however, still take the other two drugs that would have been part of that study’s chemo cocktail. In the meantime, Dr. Kane is researching the best chemos to try next and I’ll probably get started on that the first week of April. None of this “let’s do chemoembolization and then hold out for six weeks before we do anything more.” Horray! Like I said before, let’s hit this thing with all our guns locked and loaded. ALL OF THEM! This is no time for pansy-footing around!

So that’s that. We had a scare but things are fine. No need to panic. I’m not at death’s door. I am, however, going to live live live! We’re headed to Santa Fe late next week (as long as my spicy taste buds can recover by then — it’s very difficult to eat in Santa Fe if you can’t even handle Taco Bell’s extremely mild nacho cheese sauce without running for a soothing ice cube after every bite of nachos!) and getting things ready for that trip.

I’m trying to get Honey to post on here ASAP. Maybe he’ll come up with something to tell you about this weekend! Have a great one!