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Showing posts with the label liver tumor

CT report 2/16/2017

Okay, CT results from last Thursday. SMALLER.... all the lesions are about half to a quarter of the size they were. The liver lesion is dead, and slowly being carted off by my body's trash system. The spinal vertebra shows no growth; the adrenal is smaller (first time!!) and the lung lesions are shrinking. SMALLER. Other good things? I found the clothes basket with the missing underwear which now doesn't fit because of my 40 pound weight loss. No, I wouldn't recommend this diet. Another good thing? I had the energy to look for and find the laundry basket. -- I've got my appetite (and hair) back with this maintenance treatment of Yondelis. Ah, I'm pulling out the tape measure, and then ordering my fav underwear from Hanes.com. Heck, I may even order some yoga pants since all I have are black.....and too big (fortunately they have drawstrings....so they fit any weight.)

Liver Needle Biopsy Report Results

The waiting is over. Yesterday the nurse called with the results. The Liver mass is LMS and an appointment was scheduled. That's where I'm sitting now. I'm knitting, to relax and to pass the time. Soon I'll know. I'll call Mom, my daughter, my friends, my roommate. I hope this will be a short appointment. The kidney/back pain needs an RX or permission for me to keep taking Advil (or generic). The next step for treatment is Chemo. Doxyrubicin aka the Red Devil. I can only have 6 doses in a lifetime. First step is a cardiac ultrasound to measure Left Ventricle Ejection Fraction. (That is, how efficiently my heart is moving blood out of the Left Ventricle.) One side effect of this medication is sudden death due to heart attack, due to damage to the left ventricle. So they want a health LV to start, or (I suppose) they would find another treatment option. (10/13/2016 I wrote this while waiting for the oncologist appointment. Just found this in a noteb...

PET/CT Results January, 2016

At this point, only my roommate, my mother and one friend know what I'm going to tell you. First let me apologize to all my friends for not telling you personally. I just can't do it. This disease spreads. It is rare and aggressive. I'll be fighting this for the rest of my life, whether I'm in active treatment or not. We've known there will be recurrences. The November surgery was due to a PET scan that showed a mass which turned out to be benign. Two days ago, I went for a CT/PET scan. Yesterday I got the results. There are new lung lesions/nodules. Something is happening with the liver (previously it was identified as scar tissue, now it is active). There are suspicious spots in my intestines, but with the healing (at least it shows on the PET scan, it doesn't seem to be getting smaller). There's activity within a neck lymph node, which (like the others) was there in October, and is now larger/more active. Several months ago, my oncologis...

Schroedinger's Cat and my liver tumor

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The short version of Schroedinger's cat experiment (note: only hypothetical cats were theoretically harmed with this experiment) Schrödinger's cat: a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal monitor detects radioactivity (i.e. a single atom decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or the other. (from Wikipedia.) This is what I'm NOT thinking about while I was on chemo. I don't know if the tumor is alive and growing or dying and decaying. I don't want to second guess... I tried it for a while.. it was torture. If I feel bad does that mean the tumor ...