Meeting the Oncologist

Yesterday we met the Oncologist and talked about treatment plans and such. It turns out that I have:

• Renal Tumors, 9cm on the left and 2 of 1cm or less on the right.
• Mets to L1 in my spine.
• Mets to the skin (my scalp), including 1 lesion that I haven't mentioned until now. This one started as a zit.
• Mets to the Lungs--what I am calling shotgun effect, they all look like small #8 pellets on the CT and are scattered about.
• Mets to the abdominal nodes.
• Mets to the mediastinal nodes.
• Survival is about 22% at 5 years.
  

According to the Onc this is a Stage IV tumor. He is not sure what the prognosis is, but seems to me to feel it will be poor. I will need some more blood tests for him to make this determination. Oh joy.

He is advising that I will also need a MRI of my spine, as the mets to L1 could be life threatening (and the rest isn't?). Until the MRI is done he can't make a decision about what to start, but the leading options are chemotherapy for the kidney cancer or radiation for the spine mets. We also discovered that he likes and uses the guidelines from the National Comprehensive Cancer Network.

If we go for the chemo it will be 4weeks of Sutent followed by a 2 week vacation. After 2 runs he will rescan me and then decide what next. I argued a bit about that, and got him to promise that if the remaining scalp lesion shows any changes we could rescan after the first run of meds. He was rather noncommittal about surgery for the tumor in the left kidney, but I want the f'ing thing gone. I find it hard to believe that leaving it in place is a good thing.

After we got home I promptly lost it. So did Robin. Eventually we managed to hold it together long enough to pick-up the kids from day care. They will hopefully never need to know about any of this. I shudder to think what I would be doing without my family. I do love them so.

Oh, some good news. After we got home yesterday I threw out my cigarettes. I know, it may be a little late for that; but this will prove to be a battle of inches, and that is the first inch that I can claim as a victory.

Time to wait some more...