Maybe I was a little too blasé the other day when receiving the results from the latest CT. Of course I didn’t expect bad news. I’ve got bad news to last me a lifetime. I don’t need any more. But not everything that isn’t bad news is no news, as was the tag I attached to the previous post.
Having a clean peritoneum is unambiguously good news and should be celebrated as such. When I started out with chemotherapy, one of the things the oncologists warned me about was that metastases in the peritoneum tend to be resistant to chemotherapy. Something to do with a lack of circulation, if I remember correctly. Google would probably know better, but I’m loath entrust my questions of health and disease to the web. Too many human-interest stories of no relevance to my case.
Anyway, when the surgeon removed half of my colon and thereby gave this blog its name, she also scraped my peritoneum clean of all visible metastases. She was quick to emphasize afterwards that this doesn’t mean there are no metastases left in the peritoneum. It just means one can’t see them. The chances are high, she continued, that there are micrometastases that will grow with time.
A considerable amount of time has now passed. It’s four months since my operation. That nothing has grown inside my peritoneum can mean either of two things. It could be that there were no micrometastases left in the peritoneum in the first place. This is rather unlikely. It could alternatively mean that chemotherapy is doing its thing, even where it wasn’t expected to be too successful. Both of these scenarios are good news.
It’s too early to get excited about anything, but there’s no reason to be ambivalent either. Things are going well. I’m doing good. Life goes on.
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