Hey Doc……so when is my tumor going to start to SHRINK already?????featured

I can recall my first consultation appointments with my radiation oncologist and my colorectal surgeon at the Cancer Treatment Centers of America back in January as if it were yesterday.

Even though I admit that I cried through the beginning of each appointment, and my head was still swirling in the clouds from my diagnosis…I was miraculously able to retain what they had told me in my aching head.

What stands out vividly is that these doctors were almost guaranteeing I would see shrinking in the size of my rectal tumor quite quickly, which was EXTREMELY important to me because this mass was practically blocking my entire colon and I could not go to the bathroom without using stool softener every day.  I was in lots of discomfort and I wanted to at least get some relief from that as soon as possible.

So, in my unique case unlike other types of tumors and cancer, I would be in a position to tell immediately when my tumor reduced in size, since I would be able to start going to the bathroom easier. This to me was a good thing. I could rely on information directly coming from my own body, and not some test or someone’s examination.

“It should start to shrink in a few days after you start radiation and chemo, and you will feel so much better once that happens” proclaimed the Colorectal surgeon.

Say WHAT? This sounded waaaaay too good to be true to me.  A few DAYS??????? Are you serious?????? NOTHING happens in just a few days.  But hey, what did I know? He was after all the Professor of colorectal surgery and head of the Department at Drexel Medical School, and not me.

So, not taking him too seriously, I decided to just tuck his statement in the back of my mind and see what the other doctor had to say.

“The typical response is to see a reduction in the tumor by week three into the 5 1/2 weeks radiation treatment” declared my radiation oncologist. OK, this sounded much more reasonable to me. Three weeks was still very quick, but it was much more believable than a few DAYS.

Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect and what my body would do…….so I just followed the crazy yellow brick road that is cancer treatment…….and I started the radiation and chemo, holding  my breath and hoping for a quick response.

Well, turns out I didn’t get a quick response at all.

I can remember having my weekly meeting with my radiation oncologist at week three and telling him that I still didn’t feel any different.  I still had to use Miralax every night in order to have at least one bowel movement a day, and by the afternoon everything was plugged up.

He reassured me not to panic, and that every person responded differently.  I should feel relief from some shrinking soon. Well, unfortunately we had the same conversation at week four and five, and five and a half.

I WAS freaking out at this point.

Did all of the pain and suffering I endured with chemo and radiation not work? What was going on in there? Can’t we just go in and cut the darn thing out?

I really didn’t know what to think.  I was getting very scared and upset.

But, then my oncologist PA told me something that made sense to me when I started crying in her office on my last day of radiation because I hadn’t seen any signs of shrinking.  She said that my body right now was extremely inflamed. I needed to wait 8-12 weeks to let all the swelling go down before they could even think of looking at my body again via CT scan or rectal exam to see what was going on.  She said that probably my tumor had shrunk at least a bit, but that the inflammation was not letting me see these results.

This made quite a bit of sense to me, and I remember calming down and taking some deep breaths.

After all, the last three radiation treatments I had were called “boosters”, which meant they were only going to point the beam directly onto the tumor, and not any of the surrounding tissues to hit my lymph nodes as they had done in all the other sessions.  This must have caused tremendous inflammation indeed.

So, with a little more hope than before, I went home and started my two and a half month recovery period.

Then at about three weeks into my recovery at home, I finally had a sign that the tumor had shrunk a little bit! I noticed that I could go to the bathroom one afternoon with no issue.

HALLELUJAH! 🙂 You have no idea how happy I felt at that moment.

Finally……I could see that maybe all this awful radiation and chemo may have been worth something.

So, the moral of my sharing this story is to remind you to never give up hope, and to reinforce how important it is to take what the doctors say with a grain of salt. Don’t hang on their every word and think it is gospel.

It is true that each of us are unique individuals and we will all react differently under the same set of circumstances…..and that is OK!

In fact, with my case, it turned out to be MORE than OK. When I had a biopsy done of the tumor, surrounding tissue, and 39 lymph nodes  during my surgery……they were all found to be cancer FREE!!!!  It was the BEST possible outcome anyone could have hoped for.

The doctors all claimed that I had a total response to the radiation and chemo treatment, and THAT is why I had no more cancer cells.

Hmmmm…. I beg to differ a bit on that assumption, but THAT will be another blog post for another day!