For those of you asking for news about my Dad, rather than write this about 18 times, I thought I'd share the details here.

When I got home from work I found an email from LW, asking what happened, and I realized that I should have heard, so I called. Mom answered Dad's cell phone from the examining room (he was delayed in surgery and was running behind), and asked me if I had any questions, and when the doctor heard that I had asked for the details of the pathology report, he actually asked Mom if he could tell me himself (of course her telling him I was a neurobiology professor helped, I'm sure...She did! I heard her). What follows is what he told me himself.

Such a cool doctor!

So here's the deal. The mass is about 2 centimeters across, and about 1.1 millimeters of it is adenocarcinoma, so it is a small lesion, and a very small percentage of it is cancer. The doctor seems to think it's just a polyp that went bad, so to speak. It's located near the junction of the bile duct and the duodenum, although I'm not sure if it is in the ampulla vater or the duodenum itself. It doesn't appear to have spread out of the intestine itself. Here's some great information on ampullary cancer. I especially like that last part about up to 90% 5-year survival rate. I am determined to be optimistic. The doctor seemed to be.

He plans a Whipple operation, which used to be a death sentence, but with laparoscopic surgery and minimally invasive techniques and specialized training, the mortality rate is about the same as other surgeries, so I'm not too worried. The doctor said he thinks it's likely that when he removes it, there won't be anything else to worry about. I'm praying that's the case

He has a PET scan scheduled for tomorrow as there are a couple of other small lesions, but they don't appear to be neoplastic, one on the liver and one on the lung. The doctor told me it's likely the former is a hemangioma and the latter is a TB scar. There's no reason to suspect they're evil. In any case, he's going to take a look while he's got Dad opened up.

Hell, by the time you get to 71 you've got all kinds of funny things going on in your body, right?

Mom will tell me more when they leave the doctor's office.

Moral of the story: Get every intestinal bleed checked out, all the way from your input to your output. Don't let the doctor say, "Oh, it's probably stress or an ulcer, here's some Nexxium". They found this tumor early because it was bleeding and they scanned him from the mouth down.

Posted by: caltechgirl at 05:31 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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