First Chemo day and some pictures.

So I learned a lot yesterday.

The medication that I will take kills rapidly dividing cells. This will shrink the tumor but also make me loose my hair. Also it will affect my bone morrow this means that 5-9 days from now I will have reduced red and while blood cells. Right now due to the ulceration (cuts) from my cancer, I already have some anemia. So we will see what physical things that I can do next week. I will be able to get confirmation of how this is impacting my blood counts on the 27th, the day before my next treatment. The chemo-class was very informative.  Here is hoping that the shrinking of this tumor will lower my pain level and let me be both more active and be able to eat more. Two of the other high probable side effects are a sensitivity to cold and I might get some numbness in my fingertips or feet.

Our meeting with the oncologist went well. It looks like the PE scan did not show any lymph nodes lit up. While there can be false positives, this is a positive piece of data. It shows that the tumor is all in one place. It would not show small cells that might be floating around. The chemo would deal with these, they would try to divide and die.

We talked with the radiation oncologist. If I can tolerate the chemo and it is effective at shrinking the tumor. We would start one month after I stop chemo. This will give me a chance to both increase my blood counts and the chemo will continue to shrink the tumor. They would map my tumor and then shoot it with radiation that would further shrink the tumor. They would shoot radiation from multiple directions taking into account the silhouette of the tumor and avoiding tissue that they don't want to irradiate (e.g. heart, liver). Side effects of this will be some more fatigue and esophageal sores.

About a month after that, I have surgery to remove the tumor. We are still looking and talking to surgeons.

Here is a picture of the PETscan taken on the afternoon of 11/9:

Note that the lit up section, the tumor is all in one place. It is between 1/3 and 1/2 the size of my heart, the grey section above the tumor. The black sections are lungs. The gray section on the left is my liver. The white items on the outside are my ribs.

Here is a picture of the ultrasound taken on 10/26:

These pictures don't mean much to me.

Here are the pictures of my stomach in the visual spectrum on 10:24:

The pink sections are normal and the black sections are cancerous.  You can see some ulcerations on the forth picture and some bleeding on the sixth. This is causing my anemia On the seventh you can see the cancerous material interacting with the interface between my stomach and esophagus. This is what is causing the problems swallowing.