After my re-diagnosis, they took my tumour out of storage (The BC Cancer Agency keeps samples from all tumours going back to the 80’s apparently) and re-ran some tests (and some new tests) on it.

Those tests confirmed that my cancer is NOT GIST. It is a sarcoma of some type, they’re just not sure what at this point. Factoid, sarcomas make up 2% of all cancers, and GISTs (which are sarcomas) are a small percentage of those.

Three in a million will get a GIST tumour every year. In Canada, that’s 90ish people a year (of the 173,680 or so that do get Cancer every year). That this tumour is more rare than GIST doesn’t bode well for treatment aside from surgery or radiation.

At the end of the day, this means I am NOT a candidate for Gleevac/Imatnib. Gleevac costs a lot, so maybe surgery would be a bit better on the wallet!

This means I will be having surgery in the “near” future. Sometime in mid-September I’ll be going in for a relatively new type of gastroscope biopsy that only one doctor in BC performs (and he’s on Vacation until September 1st). After they get a snippet of the tumour, and it’s analyzed, will they plan for a surgery.

When this is all over, we need to find out why the BC Cancer agency missed the tumour 18 months ago (and again a year ago). It’s quite obvious to me in the August 2009 scans and the February 2009 scans, and I’m not a trained radiologist! My insides aren’t normal (missing spleen, gallbladder, half of stomach and 90-95% of pancreas), but it’s there, and it’s not small (1.8cm-ish in Feb 2009, 2.3cm-ish in August 2009).

I know there was data missing from the August 2009 copy of the CT scans I got on DVD, the question is was there data missing from the CT scans that the radiologist was looking at a year ago. What do my insides look like back in 2004?
I’ll deal with all that later, now I just need to concentrate on the short term.

For nearly six and a half years, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Last summer I was 5+ years cancer free. Another year goes by and the other shoe finally dropped.

CT Scans get routine. After ten scans or so, the only dread really becomes wondering if I’m going to throw up. You get the scanxiety in the week leading up to the scan and the results appointment. This year was the same, until the results.

Results appointments follow the same pattern. You’re seen by an Intern before the regular oncologist sees you. They can’t really tell you anything, but when they start to prod different areas and ask you if you’ve been having any pain, you get flashes of worry. When the oncologist arrives, they cut straight to the chase. The last 10 or so appointments have been “everything looks good”.

This time though, Dr. Knowling cut right to the chase. It went something like this…

“Not so good news this time, it looks like a reoccurence”.

“Oh, well that’s not good”.

“It’s near the liver, not in the liver. It doesn’t seem to be involved in any other organs”.

“How big is it?”

“It’s about 4cm in diameter. From the scans it looks like what we’d expect from a GIST tumour”.

“What’s next?”

Turns out Alice missed most of the conversation. Good thing I’m a troubleshooter and like to figure out problems. I didn’t shut down.

They’re pulling my old tumour out of storage and running some additional tests on it. They’re going to see if it is truely C-Kit negative (does not express ANY C-kit protein on the tumour cells). Apparently GIST tumours that were previously determined to be C-Kit negative might not be, and if there’s any C-Kit protein, then Gleevac is just as effective.

Once they know if it’s C-Kit negative or not, that determines the course of action. Negative means surgery, positive means Gleevac (Imatnib) drug therapy. I should know before the end of August what the course of action is. Until then, I wait.

One thing I did get to do was look at my CT Scans. I have them on DVD. At least I can see the enemy. Lurking in the center of my body. 4cm across, 1.5cm from my heart and directly behind the tip of my sternum. I see you tumour. I see you.

Linnae turned 6 on Christmas Day last year, Kaylee just turned 4 last week.

My new years resolution hasn’t faltered yet. I hope to be able to show the results off by the end of the year.

Alice is all set to work for Coke during the Olympics. She’s taking 4 weeks off to take a contract with them. She’s quite excited about it.

The Olympics! They start in a couple of weeks but there’s almost no snow on the local mountains! Whistler/Blackcomb has a bit more, but honestly, it’s looking more like spring. Some cherry trees are even blossoming!

I’ve got a keen interest to develop apps for the Iphone now that Alice has one. I woke up the other morning with a great app in mind. Some reasearch on the app store and a consult with Alice make me think I’m onto something. I might have to buy a Mac in the next few days. Probably just end up with a Mac Mini.

I finally got around to picking one up today, and so far it’s impressive.

Also, the Mimo mini-monitor I previously mentioned arrived a while back. It’s a great addition. I run sidebar apps and small windows, like the Outlook Calendar Reminder window on it. It fits MSN Live chat windows nicely as well.

I’m now dropping back to one scan a year.

Alice’s daily driver is (was?) a 1999 Volkswagen Golf GLS A4. It’s been a decent car but a bit small. We’ve been pretty good on keeping up on the maintenance, but it finally caught up. Its last checkup revealed a need for a new head gasket (oil leak), new strut tower, and new back brakes and rotors. Looking at a couple thousand dollar bill.

We decided it’s time for a new car. We had researched new cars last year and had narrowed it down to a Dodge Journey or a Mazda 5. We were getting ready to buy a new car when my car (2004 RX8 GT) decided to die on the drive home from work. Initially it looked like a blown engine, but it turns out it was only 1200 bucks worth of engine coils, sparkplugs and a new catalytic converter.

The good news is that we still had enough in the budget to buy a new car. We decided on a Mazda 5 from Signature Mazda, and brought it home on March 30th. My car, newly repaired, followed home on the 31st. This left us with 4 driveable cars parked at our house with the loaner 1991 Jeep Pioneer from Dad. The Volkswagen spent its first night outside in 10 years.

Next morning, we found the Golf with its windows down in the rain. Turns out someone had broken in via the automatic window down feature (which neccesitated smashing a lock). Luckily, we’d emptied the car, and they only managed to break the door lock and glove box lock (without breaking into it!).

*sigh* at least it’ll be all cleaned up and repaired when we sell it

I did get a copy of the images from the CT scan and chest Xray. Very cool! Going to try and post some pictures from it.

TED is something I’ve enjoyed for the last couple of years.

I ordered one of these the other day and just got word it’s shipping.

I’ll do up a little review when it comes in.