Meet the Surgeon

Met with a liver surgeon today. The word is that Dr. Portera is "the man" to have cutting on your liver. He's not only a surgeon but also he's familiar with oncology and the process of how they treat it. That's good for me, because it means the docs all work together and that they are familiar with what each other does.

The next step for me is yet another test. This one is a detailed CT scan, with the goal of building a 3-D model of my liver and how the tumor there is entangled with the other parts. It seems that there are two big blood vessels there, the vena cava and the portal vein. If the tumor has grown onto those, then the tumor is considered "not operable." (If they remove either of those I'll die.) My fingers are crossed, of course. That test will take place next Tuesday, so watch for an update then.

For more information on the parts of the liver, look here. On that page you can see the right and left lobes. The right side, maybe 70% by size, of my liver is almost completely taken over by the tumor. This may account for the symptom of fatigue that I've been having. The surgeon said that he'll have to remove that entire right lobe, but that since it's not doing me any good now anyway I shouldn't notice its absence. The liver is one of the most forgiving organs, in that it will grow back in a few months and I should be as good as new.