Hi, everyone. I wanted to have a central place to send people if they had questions (for me, really– I love my friends and family dearly, but retelling things as I update everyone is quite taxing, and you all know I’m wordy AF). So here’s a short narrative explanation and a current status.
In September of 2023, I had two different instances where for approximately two days I had horrible, non-stop nausea\/diarrhea attacks that came in frequent waves and continued until I was totally empty. My doctor (and I) initially thought I just got unlucky and caught a form of norovirus twice. Then it happened a third time. Then a fourth, a fifth, a sixth… it became a pretty serious problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I saw a gastroenterologist. The first thing we found was a bit of GERD, not surprising as I had that once long ago. But the doctor wanted a closer look, and let’s just say that probably saved my life (I hope!). My throat\/stomach was fine, but the other scope (the colonoscopy) found cancer. This was in late February, 2024. The time since then has been a whirlwind of appointments and medical tests. I was slated for surgery, but a PET scan days before found that the cancer was spread a bit more than the surgeon initially thought (still fairly local; it’s not great news for me, but it isn’t catastrophic). The oncologist and surgeon agreed that I needed to do a round of chemotherapy before the surgery so that the surgeon could “get all of it” when operating, since this isn’t a surgery you do twice in any short period. Hi, everyone. I wanted to have a central place to send people if they had questions (for me, really– I love my friends and family dearly, but retelling things as I update everyone is quite taxing, and you all know I’m wordy AF). So here’s a short narrative explanation and a current status. In September…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-351","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/phillalexander.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/phillalexander.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/phillalexander.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phillalexander.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phillalexander.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=351"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/phillalexander.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":369,"href":"https:\/\/phillalexander.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/351\/revisions\/369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/phillalexander.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
My chemotherapy starts on 4\/15\/24. <\/strong>The early prognosis is two months of chemo, then a new PET scan to see if the cancer reacted well. If it did, then we move to surgery. If not, I am guessing that means the chemo continues until it does look like we have the reaction the doctors want (which is shrinkage of the lymph nodes around the colon cancer).
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