January 26, 2024
We saw Dr. B today. He confirmed what we already read from the scans. The last two rounds of chemo had less effect than we had hoped. Dr. B explained that sometimes refractory disease occurs during chemotherapy when cancer stops responding to treatment. He said this seems to be the case with many people with this type of cancer that are diagnosed at younger ages that is the norm. Older patients still tend to respond well to this treatment. There is an increasing issue that the medical community is still trying to understand as far as the number of younger people with rectal cancer. It does open the doors to having more genetic testing done but they are finding it does not appear to be genetic. That leaves some environmental factors that are affecting these outcomes. Unfortunately, we are experiencing this firsthand. What does this mean for David? Well… this knocks out being able to treat the cancer systematically in this way which we really need to be able to do for metastasis. Dr. B said he would like to proceed with the liver resection surgery to remove the two lesions. We are not guaranteed that more “spots” won’t pop up. He said he wanted to schedule a CT scan for David’s lungs prior to surgery just to ensure that they were clear. He said he did not expect for there to be anything there, but it was best to check before proceeding with such an invasive surgery only to find out later there was more spread. They were able to get a CT appointment for Saturday (tomorrow). We did not feel good leaving the office today. A million things go through your head when you get results like this…the first one being “what next?”.