One year ago...

One year ago today I was "prepping" for my BIG surgery; the first surgery after my diagnosis of metastatic neuroendocrine cancer (Carcinoid).  This was a right-hemicolectomy.  The surgeon was planning on a laporascopic surgery (successful).  They go in and take out part of your small intestines.  I remember feeling a bit nervous, as would be expected.  My biggest fear was that they would have to do a colostomy.  I was told by the gastroenterologist that I wouldn't need one but my surgeon said that you just never know for sure until you get in there.  The prep is not fun.  This time, however, I did not have to use the Movi-prep but just take some ducolax pills and drink a two-week supply of miralax over a few hours.  Much less nasty tasting than the Movi-prep.  It seems like a lifetime ago.  My only regret is that I wish I had the knowledge that I have now.  I would have asked more questions about doing it laporascopically vs. open.  I know now that the "open" allows them to "run the bowel, and look for metastases or second primaries, etc.  It's much harder to do it when the surgery is laporascopic.  To this day, I don't know how much he looked around in there.  I know that if there is anything else (and my chances of local recurrence are high), it will be slow-growing so not really urgent.  In fact, I asked my oncologist if I needed to have a colonoscopy again (recommended by gastro doc) and he said "no".   Anything they find will be so small we wouldn't do anything about it yet.  I'm not sure how I really feel about that attitude.  If it's small, it can be removed during the colonoscopy, right?  Also, I still worry about regular colon cancer since both my parents had it and so did my mom's brother.  I know with all my CT scans, it'll show up if something is big enough.  I think.

The surgery went fine.  They took out about a foot of small intestine, my illeol cecal valve, appendix and biopsied a couple of the liver tumors.  A total of 10 tumors out of my small intestines, my appendix was completely occluded by tumor and 11 or 13 lymph notes were all cancer too.  Sounds terrifying and to read my pathology report it is.  It's about 3 pages long!  I'm so very grateful this is a fairly slow-growing cancer.  It is not always.  Sometimes it is very aggressive.  Sometimes it changes from being slow to fast growing.  Crazy disease.

I am grateful for time.  The time I've had this past year to understand my disease better.  Time to enjoy life.  Feeling pretty good most of the time.  It's all about time, isn't it?  How much time do we have?  What to do with our time?  What time is it?