Nicole's Notes

So my tumour had advanced to what he called Stage C. Stage A is when it's snugged up against the interior lining of the colon (easy to remove, not very big). Stage B1 is when it's grown out into the middle of the actual colon and is starting to obstruct shit. Literally. Ew. Stage B2 is when it starts to breach the muscle wall surrounding the colon, and Stage C is when it reaches its slimy little tentacles out and starts playing footsie with the lymph nodes which surround the colon. The lymph nodes are there to fight bacteria which often enter the body through food. Would you like fries with that? Stage D is where it's metastisized and is busy mamboing throughout your organs.

I'm at stage C, but just barely, since it only managed to snare one of the twenty one lymph nodes. That's good. And because my tumour was in the right or ascending colon, I have a lot less chance of recurrance than, say, a tumour found in the descending colon. Also good. Unfortunately, I still wind up with a 25-40% chance of the cancer coming back. Sucko.

However, through the marvels of modern medicine, I can hedge my bets using chemical warfare! Whoopie! Lowers my risk of recurrance to 11-28%. Radiation therapy doesn't really do diddly squat for colorectal cancer, possibly because your colon is like an internal slinky. No, it doesn't go down stairs, alone or in pairs, or make a slinkity sound, but it does move around a lot, so that it's hard to precisely aim the radiation.

Plus, he's going to send me to a genetic counsellor. I can see it now, he looks at my genotype, looks at Jason's, shakes his head and says, "You two better not breed. The results would be catastrophic!" Okay, maybe not. But the genetic counsellor can identify whether I've got some strange mutation that might pass on to kids or something. Since there is no family history of this sort of thing (all my close relatives are signing up for colonoscopies), and I am so young, they really are confused as to how I got it. My Dad is convinced it's something I ate.

So, back to the chemical warfare: A combination of fluorouracil (street name: 5-FU) and leucovorin (a water soluble vitamin in the folate group that amplifies the effects of 5-FU) is the standard treatment. The three most common side effects of this treatment are: mild nausea, diarrhea and mouth sores (like canker sores). The other treatments sometimes used have much harsher side effects. They'll probably give me something to counteract the nausea (since it's the most likely side effect for someone who gets car sick after a two minute ride in a stick shift).

The schedule for the drugs is daily 20 minute treatments, Monday to Friday for one week, and then 3 weeks off. For the treatments, they sit me in a lazy boy in front of a TV, hook me to an IV and press GO (they showed me the lazyboys - the ones for people who need treatments lasting more than an hour have VCRs!). The week of the treatments I'll be nauseous; the week following, I'll lack energy; the final two weeks I should feel fairly normal. 6 months of this schedule, followed by regular Carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) blood tests and the occasional colonoscopy to watch for a recurrance should see me free and clear. I can work all the way through, except for the 20 minutes I'm at the hospital on treatment days.

My first round starts December 1. Due to the holidays, my second round won't be until the first Monday in January. :) Little hard to visit the hospital from Toronto... or the cottage!