"Unfortunately, There is Bad News...."

"Unfortunately, there is bad news on your scan," Dr. Leonard Saltz, my medical oncologist, told Susan and me during our visit to his office on Tuesday of last week. The scan to which he referred was a CT scan that had been taken the previous week with the primary purpose of establishing a baseline observation of my newly hypertrophied liver, the product of my most recent, August 3rd, liver surgery. The bad news was two apparent tumors in the liver and perhaps a tumor in a lung and in my lower abdomen. Although it seemed obvious that Dr. Saltz was fairly sure about the tumors in the liver, he said that the next diagnostic step would be a PET scan, which I underwent two days later. 

Today, we met again with Dr. Saltz, who reported to us that the PET scan "lit up" on three tumors in the liver, in addition to a region in the liver along the surgical line that might be more tumors or just inflammation. Although the spot in the lung also lit up, he is not sure whether or not it is a tumor. In any case, he does not seem to think the possible lung tumor is a very weighty issue, as compared with the tumors in the liver.

Dr. Saltz recommends that I move forward with a lighter program of chemotherapy, tentatively commencing in early November for a six-month period, than he had planned for me when the possibility of cure, however slight, justified heroic measures, such as the back-to-back surgeries I underwent this summer. I conveyed to him that, if cure is not a realistic possibility, my objective in any treatment regimen would be quality of remaining days, not quantity of remaining days.  

Dr. Saltz refused to be drawn into any speculation as to how long I may live. From the little I've read and heard on the subject, I have in my mind as a working hypothesis that a year or two might be a realistic life expectancy for someone in my situation.  

Actually, I don't find myself thinking much about how long I may live. I do think a lot about what the rest of my life will be like and the decisions that I am likely to face along the way. I think a lot about the effect on my family of my remaining life, my manner of dying, and my being deceased.

Susan and I and our children have had a week to adjust to the roller coaster of no hope to slight hope to no hope of a cure. Now, I find myself turning my attention to trying to recover sufficiently, through diet and exercise, from the surgeries and their complications to enable Susan and me to resume some semblance of a normal social life and perhaps even take a trip somewhere. When I was a kid, my family spent our summers at Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. I love the ocean, and I am fantasizing about a sojourn at some posh beach resort. We'll see what happens, what's possible. It seems that there is always something on which to pin one's hopes!