gambit

Good news: I don’t have CC

Bad news: I have pancreatic cancer

Quick update. Surgery went well. Dr said they got it all out. Waiting for pathology. In a good amount of pain still. Tried clear liquids today but it hurt immediately. Discharge date pushed back till 1/21.

Thank you all for the well wishes.

Thanks Darla and Catherine. I think I’m in really good hands (literally). I’ll post more updates as things progress.

Congrats on 6 years Lainy! Sometimes I’m not sure what to believe with the ‘beyond’. My 5 year old daughter told me she say Tytus, who was my Rottweiler for 13 years, but passed before she was born and she described him to a tee. The same psychic lady at my cousin’s house told my wife that my nana and I had such a strong and special bond that she waited for me and decided to be reincarnated into my daughter, whose middle name is my nana’s name. Now I can’t ever scold her!

Thanks Lainy. I think I will be fine once everything is said and done, even if I have to fight like hell. The chloraseptic is a great trick. I’m putting it in my notes. My surgery is at 815am and they said they’ll have me up and walking that night. Was the epidural for his stomach cancer pain or pain from surgery?

So a bit of an update. I dropped off my records to UCSF and haven’t heard back yet. I assume they’re pretty busy and people are off for the holidays. I also went to Stanford and met Dr Norton and his staff on Wednesday. I have to say it was a really great visit. Kaiser had sent them an incomplete set of images do I had them redo it and brought the new CDs in just before my visit. They had to review before they saw me. They were really thorough in going through my records and images because they recalled what I had done on certain dates when I couldn’t. Anyways, they said the fact that my CA 19 markers were really low and the FISH test was negative was really a good thing and based on the image of the ‘lesion’, he said if he had to to lean one way he would lean toward not being cancerous, but can’t be sure till he gets it out. He also saw a benign growth in my ampulary duct that was incorrectly labelled as bulbous by Kaiser. He said that although it’s benign now it can become cancerous and it looks more fibrous and not bulbous at all. He doesn’t think that I need a full Whipple, but a modified where I can keep my stomach intact. He also didn’t like the fact that Kaiser didn’t think that my bilirubin hitting 10 and then as high as 15 wasn’t a big deal and that they still insisted it was a gallstone, which they never found. I schedule my surgery for 1/11 and I really think I’m in good hands. If UCSF can meet with me before that then I’ll go in for a consultation, but if not then I’m going to move ahead with Stanford.

Thanks Deb. I sent you an email, but I forgot to ask what aborted resection is?

A lot of my online research pointed to UCSF. I wonder why my Kaiser surgeon recommended Stanford over UCSF, especially when he trained there for 9 years?