Around 24 hours later, Lisa and I were back at Hopkins to talk to the medical oncologist. For some reason, I thought his first name was Steve, when it was actually Dan. So Lisa and I now referred to him has Stevie, Steve-o, Little Steven, etc. as we waited for him to come in. So far, we’d met with three Hopkins doctors and speculated about which one would be the best street fighter. The surgeon, she would be the toughest. The radiation guy looked to be a scrapper. Steve-o was solid and wouldn’t back down. A good team.
Steve-o came in and dropped a bomb on us. By his estimation, it looked as if there would be no radiation/chemo. Lisa and I looked at each other.
What?
Lisa later told me that she assumed that Steve-o had gone rogue and that we’d have to weigh conflicting recommendations to figure out the next steps. He quickly told us that the three doctors had spoken the night before and this was the current thinking. Steve-o showed us an online tool where you put in variables like age, gender, and tumor stage and it calculated percentages of complete recovery, recurrence, and longevity with and without using radiation before surgery based on 5 years of patient data. For me, there we no difference at all. Radiation did nothing for me, in fact, it was a greater risk due to the exposure.
My little tumor hadn’t gone T3 yet, which means that it hadn’t breached the outer wall of the colon and hit the lymph nodes. One more test, an MRI, was needed to confirm this, but we could be cautiously optimistic that the lymph nodes were clear. Steve-o complimented me for going to the doctor when something funky was happening instead of waiting and complimented my doctor’s instincts in doing the colonoscopy. If we’d waited until summer, the tumor might have gone T3 and needed radiation.
Long-term game plan III:
- MRI to confirm lymph nodes aren’t affected.
- Surgery to remove the tumor.
- Ileostomy and “bag” for 3 months.
- Reversal of ileostomy and recovery.