Quick Status Report

I'm one week into a 4-week chemotherapy program, designed to shrink the tumors. At the end of the 4th week we'll do another PET scan. That will show how effective the chemo treatment is. If the results are good, I'll continue chemotherapy for another two months or so. At that time we'll make the decision about surgery, in January or February, 2009. The most likely scenario calls for me to have surgery on the primary tumor first (colon), and then, after a bit of recovery, having the liver resection done second. Following that I can look forward to another round of chemotherapy, coupled with some radiation, to ensure that everything is really, really gone. All this is how they come up with a cure, rather than with just "backing it off" a bit to buy time. It will be hard, but we're going for the whole thing to be fixed and over with.