Meeting with Dr Poen

Last week, Pete and I met with Dr Poen (my radiation oncologist). We have always loved having him as a doctor -- he is about our age, has two young kids, and has always been incredibly open, honest and straightforward in his conversations with us. Plus, he is the doctor who predicted almost to the day when the symptoms from radiation and chemo would start for me -- you gotta love that level of precision in an oncologist!!

One of the most helpful pieces of advice that he gave us during our meeting last week was around setting our expectations for the scan tomorrow. Dr Poen feels pretty confident that my main tumor has shrunk considerably and/or is completely gone by now, which is great news. But he also cautioned that the chances that we'll get 100% clarification about the spot on my liver is pretty minimal. He predicts that the liver specialist (Dr Warren) will still want to do some sort of exam of my liver during surgery (e.g., intra-operative ultrasound and/or biopsy) in order to better assess exactly what is going on. And so he cautioned us about expecting too much when we go in for the results next week. He said that, in his mind, the most important thing that we should all be hoping for with tomorrow's scan is that it does not reveal any "surprises". By this, he means that we all need to hope and pray that there are no other "suspicious" spots that appear anywhere else in my body that did not show up on earlier scans since this would suggest that the cancer has spread. So this is what I meant when I wrote in an earlier blog about praying for only "good surprises."

The other question I asked Dr Poen during our meeting was whether, in his experience, I could feel as healthy as I do and yet still have cancer. He agreed that the fact that I feel as great as I do is a good sign -- he feels confident that I would not feel this way if I had an aggressive cancer growing inside me right now. But he also cautioned that feeling great does not rule out the possibility that there are slow-growing cancer cells that might still remain. Okay, got it! Get me into surgery ASAP!!