TheSuarezes

Author: Andy

  • April 10th – Oncologist

    We had an appointment to see our oncologist (first since learning it was cancer). He had spent quite some time reviewing her case and had conferred with several other doctors too. The issue that we are facing is that it’s not obvious where the cancer is, it is obvious that it has spread to the lymph nodes though (so that kinda sucks). He says that the marker profile seems to imply that it is either coming from rectal, the lower part of the colon, or possibly the appendix. Things will be moving faster now….

    • He wants to refer us to a team downtown (Northwestern – all of these doctors for Rebecca are Northwestern doctors) that is specialized in this type of cancer (adenocarcinoma).
    • He also wants Rebecca to get a colonoscopy as that may reveal where the cancer is.
    • He wants a bone marrow biopsy
    • The Chicago team will want to meet with us and they may want to do a procedure where they go into the appendix to look and see if there is any disease in there

  • April 9th – Catch up

    Since November (’24) Rebecca has been experiencing pains in her lower right abdomen, she thought she may have a hernia. We made an appointment to see a doctor, but that seems to be a great undertaking these days (to get an initial appointment with one). So we weren’t able to get in to one until mid-january. The doctor had Rebecca get a whole bunch of blood tests and ordered a CT of her pelvis. Results of this were “numerous abdominal and pelvic lymph nodes”, and issues with the bile duct of the liver were observed. The doctor wanted us to schedule appointments with a gastroenterologist and an oncologist.

    The soonest we could get into the gastro was mid-march (they wanted to do July), and the oncology place didn’t want to make an appointment with us until we knew what the gastro place said. So we waited.

    Coming up on our appointment in mid-march we noticed that Rebecca’s left leg was retaining water/swollen. We reached out to her doctor and when it was still present the next day the doctor sent us to the hospital (in case it was a blood clot). At the hospital they ran a battery of tests and noticed the lymph nodes and reached out to the oncology office (that we hadn’t even visited yet) and that doctor ordered a whole bunch more blood tests (along with leukemia, hiv, hepatitis, and others). He also had them do a CT of the chest and of the abdomen and pelvis. Ultimately there was no blood clot, and the swelling was attributed to the enlarged lymph nodes putting pressure on something at the top of the leg that was causing the swelling.

    We saw the gastro several days later and he had already been strategizing with the oncologist on what they wanted to do. We did appointments for an MRI of abdomen, and a PETCT scan and more blood tests.

    We met with the oncologist on April 2nd and he was not sure one way or another as some things were pointing to cancer, and others were not. We had an edoscopic ultrasonography (EUS) of the upper GI scheduled (on the 4th) and he was hoping that it may shed more light on what was going on, and that if the gastro was able to he would do a biopsy during it and maybe get more info.

    On April 4th we went in for the endoscopy (EUS) and it went well. Afterwords the gastro came in to see us and let us know that he was able to see a lymph node while doing the procedure and that it tested positive for cancer (adenocarcinoma). We were a bit shocked that we were able to get info like that so soon after the test, we hadn’t been ready to receive that info right then (we had assumed we would get info the following week – since it was a friday)

    An appointment was scheduled for the oncologist on April 10th.