Biopsy day: good news and bad news...

They let me go home Wednesday afternoon... After being cooped up in the hospital for a few days, I forgot how snow you saps were getting!

LRMC  in St Joseph, MI

I went back to work as soon as I could. My techs at Lakeland knew what was going on, but didn't know I was out. Bill had scheduled the work down there, but I took the call from them, because I thought it would be a cool surprise to just show up!

In typical fashion I was over a half hour late (even after leaving a half hour early because of the weather). Didn't mater, it was cool to lighten someones day just by not being dead. (That's about the easiest way to do it, eh?) It felt great to be useful again too. I know things will probably never be "normal" again, but I just want to pretend...

Friday was biopsy results day, and I was pretty anxious to get there and find out what was happening. At this point they had only performed a liver biopsy, and still had not scheduled a colonoscopy because of the dicey nature of my appendix. So we kinda knew the results wouldn't be complete... At this point I was still holding out some hope that the liver lesions were not cancerous.

Well, that didn't work out. It was conclusive that the spots on my liver were cancerous, and that it originated in my GI tract. There was also some blood test results, and this was where thing got a little scary (as if it wasn't already) I had elevated levels that could have indicated colon OR pancreatic cancer! However, the doctor said that he thought pancreatic was unlikely because the pancreas didn't look bad on the CT, and the colon had a very obvious tumor.

The really good news from this visit was what I was told about my situation regardless of what type of cancer it was. That was the fact that I had no actual symptoms, meaning all organ function was still normal, all my blood enzymes were normal, basically everything was fine with the exception of a big ol' ugly tumor on my colon, and a liver that looks like swiss cheese. The big deal here is that I'M NOT SICK! As the doc said "We do not have to kill a single cancer cell, all we have to do is keep it from spreading and you can live another 30 or 40 years easy!"

I picked up on that one sentence and ran with it. I walked out of there feeling pretty good. Angela walked out of there thinking about pancreatic cancer.